recent ATCs

i had the most wonderful day today. i got together with a very dear friend and we played. it had been quite a while since i'd seen her or her partner, and even longer since we'd had an art day, and it was so so good. we played around with gelatin monoprints, and talked art and queer politics and everything in between, and she showed me the various steps she took in making her wedding thank you cards (mine arrived while i was away - i'll definitely be posting it soon, it's so amazing!). we had a little show and tell, and oohed and awed over the amazing pieces i received in last year's chunky pages swap and tip in page swap.

i want to experiment a bit more with the gelatin prints before i post pictures, because today i mostly just started on the base layer of what i'd like to do. i was inspired by an article in the most recent issue of quilting arts magazine, and did a bunch of research online, and our results weren't quite as we expected, though still pretty damn fabulous!

however, in the meantime, i wanted to post the first ATCs i've made in months and months! on wednesday evening i went to the ATC trade group at the richmond art gallery. it was only my second time there and i hadn't made any more cards since i went in may, so i was busy for a few days before, working on some ATCs to take.

i'm feeling very scattered right now, and my supplies are all roaming about the house, so i basically sat myself down and told myself that i was ONLY allowed to use the stuff that was on the table. i pulled out ink pads and some stamps to go along with it, and got to work. i'm quite happy with them.


bluebirds

vintage sheet music, strip of pink tickets, strip of page from a vintage medical book, and blue birds scanned from a vintage card

snip

asian language paper with a blender marker transfer, stazon ink applied through punchinella and part of an invoice ticket.

music/language

stazon ink applied with a netting mask onto vintage sheet music, small pieces of the asian language paper tinted with stazon, pink coupon and vintage silver leaf

admit one

vintage sheet music with an overlay of a left over german/russian dictionary page, punchinella stamped invoice ticket, purple triangles inspired by the fabulous phizzychick, pink coupon

oedipus

the background for this one is from a very old medical book, the paper is extremely fragile until it's glued onto a sturdier surface. the particular page used is talking about the oedipus complex, so i chose postage stamps with a "father" type figure and a "daughter". it's over stamped with two different designs, in green and in blue stazon. vintage silver foil leaf in the centre, and a blue resister glued on using glossy accents.

constitution

the background is a dictionary page, punched out invoice tags, british postage stamp, a scrap of patterened paper, and vintage hole protector thingies (they have a very cool texture in person, they're fabricy!), finished off with blue ink

family strength

transparency image of my great grandmother overlaid on sheet music, b&w film strip along the edge, vintage dictionary snippet, and stazon detailing.

obsolete

vintage photo found on my most recent trip, scanned and printed out. sheet music and asian language page, vintage silver foil leaf, and an office supply stamp "obsolete"

royal command

sheet music stamped with red stazon polka dots, british stamps, cigar band, and vintage pharmacy label

queen 997

stazon inked over netting mask onto a page from a vintage german children's book, triangles cut from canada post labels, punchinella mask stamped invoice tag, and a british stamp

contempt and contemplation

dictionary page stamped with green flower design,asian language page cut with a fiskars scalloped punch and stamped with stazon, then the small praying hands cabachon was glued on with glossy accents. small bits of yellow paper, and part of a vintage card with sewing snaps.

15 cents

vintage sheet music, a vintage ticket, green strip and triangles cut from canada post mailing labels, and a stamp with a neat design.


what do you think? i was quite happy with them.

the group was fairly small, but it was fun. mostly people i hadn't met yet, and a neat mix of styles for trading. i had more cards than there were people at the meeting, so despite trading for 2 cards with a few people, i still have some left for next time. i'll slowly be building up my stock!

last altered ancestor piece!

huraay!! my last altered ancestor piece FINALLY arrived, so i can post it here!

this was for the_trademarks, and her grandfather was a bookie for the mob, and loved to gamble, and had a tattoo from the korean war. her grandmother loved yellow roses, among other things. and they were catholic.

i worked on it off and on for a few weeks (so many layers to dry!), and the yellow was a big departure for me.

this was the first stage, so that you can see the silicone transfer.


and the final result.

the background is 6 vintage playing cards glued onto mat board. the card on the upper left is a 2 of hearts, which i thought was cheesy and sweet, but it's barely visible. the cards were white washed, and then i used the silicone transfer technique to transfer the photo. the silicone wasn't quite dry, so some parts rubbed off, but i kinda like that. after that was all dry i washed over it again with light yellow paint. i decided to use tattoo style stamps because of her grandpa's tattoo, and i stamped the yellow roses for her grandmother and and the cross for their religion. those stamps are all embossed. i smudged the whole background with a bit of black, to blend the picture in better, and then sprinkled some black embossing powder to make the random black dots. the love stamp is staZon, because i wasn't going to emboss it, and my black pigment ink pad is too light (it's drying out). and the sparkly heart brad is actually a more yellowy cream than it scanned, so it matches better than that!


a few of the GHI atcs i made have been received, but i'll probably wait until they all are before i post them here.

ancestor piece and chunky page

more stuff to post!

a few more pieces that i've made have been received, so i can post them now.

first, another altered ancestor piece.

the recipient didn't know who these people actually are, she just found the pic with her family photos, so i used the friend stamp. she said she liked blue and brown, so i did that, and i was a bit worried it was too similar to the other piece i made, but it's different shades.

the background is the peeling paper technique from the claudine hellmuth book i bought a few weeks ago, using music. i saturated it with blue walnut ink, and then blotted it to get an even colour. it took FOREVER to dry! once it was dry i stamped it with staZon, the two brown shades, using a stamp set from joanns. i made the pic more brown before printing it, and then edged it with the dark brown staZon to create a "frame".

and a chunky 4x4 page

the background is strips of text attached with acrylic medium that was mixed with blue and white paint. the typewriter stamp is from alpha stamps (love!) and is stamped with staZon ultramarine (also LOVE!)


pop up! well, kinda. more like "pull tab"!


very cool stamp from alpha stamps, again stamped with the staZon. background was painted with the leftover medium/paint mixture from the front.

close up of the fibers - full of beads and teensy little shrinky dinks

that staZon ink works fab for shrinky dinks!

i was really happy with these two. this week i've been working on some more pieces using a silicone transfer technique, which is SOOOO damn cool, but all the piece i'm working on are still secret at the moment.

it's countdown time again! and another ancestor piece!

lisa voltrath is doing a countdown for fathers day, the link is HERE. they're linkware, as usual, so don't forget to post the link somewhere before downloading them! the first page is up, and damn, they're cute! i can't decide if my favourite is the little boy with the huge cowlick (it looks like a faux hawk!), or the two little sailor boys. so cute!


also, one of the altered ancestor pieces i sent out last week has been received!

this piece is a bit simpler in appearance than some of the ones i've done, but i really couldn't find anything else to add! i like the simplicity of it, actually.


it's a base of heavy weight cardboard painted with a mixture of pink acrylic and golden acrylic gel medium (regular gel) . before the mixture dried, i wrote the word love in it and textured it a bit. after it was dry i painted it with a wash of red paint, so that the colour would pool in the writing and the texture. it worked pretty well, though i kinda wish i'd had more texture over the main part of the body. i altered the photo of the recipients grandparents as teenagers to make it shades of red and pink before printing it, then glued it onto the background. i then used my big bite crop-o-dile to punch the holes in a heart shape before embroidering a chain stitch in raspberry coloured satin cording. i'd been dying to do some embroidery like this, so i was excited to try it! i wish the big bite had a bit bigger opening - the cardboard was almost too thick to fit!

chunky 4x4 pages and altered ancestor pieces

here's a chunky page from back in march! it went to australia though, so it took a while to post!

kind of a hodgepodge... i'm not sure what language the background is, but it's something middle eastern... and then i found the stamp from pakistan, and decided they went together. i like the varying colours of the metal, and i did the foil transfer with double sided tape, which i'd never tried before.

i like this random frame. it's not framing anything, but that's okay!


for someone who loves clocks and the imagery of time


i was really stuck on this one, because the recipient had commented on this page i made, and like it, but said she wanted colour... i knew i was going to do the clocks, and i ended up having a ton of ideas, but i couldn't decide which one to use. once i remembered the playing cards i'd bought with the clock gears on them, it all came together!

i tried to do a packing tape transfer with the playing cards, but that failed! it did allow me to scrap off the majority of the card though, so the circles on the front are much thinner than they were originally. and then i tried desperately to make the little embossed gold wings move, but that failed too, and i eventually gave up. i did leave them unglued, so if she's displaying the page on the wall or something where it won't be flattened against other pages, she can bend the wing edges up a little bit.

the backside is paint and ink and clock stamps overlaid with a contact sheet transfer of the "time" entry in a children's dictionary. the little clock came from alphastamps.com - i ordered it for this page, and then forgot all about it until the last minute!

i hope the clock pieces stayed okay in the fibers - they were so tiny, and the fibers were too chunky to really tie them around them, so i glued them on with glossy accents.


and for someone who appreciates sacred hearts as much as i do!


i'm SOOO in love with that heart! i finished it weeks before i got around to finishing the page, and it sat on my coffee table the whole time. everytime i saw it i had to pick it up and look at it! my family was getting soooo tired of me telling them how much i loved it!

i cut a heart shape out of cardboard, and then wrapped the red velvet around it, sewing across the back to stretch the velvet. the background is paint and this really cool acrylic medium with eensy little glass balls in it, very cool texture. i cut vague flames shapes out of chiffon and lining fabric and singed the edges, causing the fabric to curl into itself and become flame like, and then i tacked the flames onto the back of the heart. i glued the whole thing onto the backdrop with silicone sealant, since my dad has stolen and lost my goop AGAIN.

the word ART is stamped on the backs of asian game tiles of some sort, i liked the organic feel of them, and the fact that they're black. (duh!) i drilled holes in them to thread the wire through. i really love that wire too, it's got very subtle colour changes through it, but i didn't get to use enough for this piece for it to actually show.


i cut long strips of the flame fabrics and burned them as well, they're the fibers hanging off the side of the page, along with some black velvet rickrack, but you can't see how long they are.



and i've also joined a new swap called altered ancestors. we all e-mailed out photos of our ancestors, along with little bios, and every two weeks we make up a new art piece for someone in the swap. it's really neat, i didn't truly appreciate how difficult it can be to make art using a specific person - you feel as though there's such a need to be accurate! sure, that stamp of the eiffel tower might look cool... but did that person ever leave north america? it's been really fun though, and i'm working in a 6"x6" format, which is a nice change from the 4x4 size of the chunky page swap.

these were the first two pieces i did.

this is the swapper's grandmother, mom and uncle. her grandmother married at 15, and was widowed at 17, when she was 5 months pregnant with the uncle. her husband was 30 when he died of TB. hence the word "strong".

i've been DYING for a project to use one of these glass pieces in! they're exactly 4x4, so they don't work for chunky pages as easily - the edges are kinda sharp, so they need to be surrounded by something. i coated the sharp edges that aren't hidden with glossy accents, that shit works for everything! the base is super thick cardboard, painted dark brown, you can see it peering through the holes. the background is player piano paper, and i stamped it with punchinella and ink, using a make up sponge. that's partly why i'm so excited, i can NEVER get punchinella to work the way i want it to when i use paint, but ink works fabulous!

and the back

very simple. i don't even know if we're supposed to decorate the back or not, but i didn't want to leave it totally bare. the ribbon and the metal thing are positioned to help hold the glass in place. it's not actually glued, just held in by various pieces on the front and back. it's pretty secure.

and the second piece -
i was all worried that it wouldn't be as cool as the piece above, but i really like it. i LOVE the photo she sent me, it's of her great grandparents on their wedding day. they were polish immigrants, and the picture is about 90 years old. it has water damage on it, but i think that just adds to it!

i was in love with the bits of blue caused by the damage, so i went with a blue and brown page.

the background is a slightly mottled blue, then i stamped it with plastic lace and one of my nick bantok stamp pads. it didn't work as well as i wanted, so i added swirly stamps in another shade of the nick bantok inks, and one of the tim holtz ink pads (old photo, i think). the big swirls are grungeboard, in the polkadot pattern. i painted them the same shade as the edges of the base, matched to the backing paper, and then added ink (tim holtz old photo again). the photo is printed on transparency film, and there's a piece of cream cardstock behind it, and then an oval of white tracing paper between the people and the cardstock, because i didn't want them to be too yellow/creamy. the corners are pewter, stamped with staZon saddle brown, as is the charm at the bottom that says "cherish". the twill tape was stamped with staZon as well, the other shade of brown. i used glossy accents to glue the metal bits down, it works better than regular glue.

i'm working on my next two pieces tonight. i bought the book "collage discover workshop" by claudine hellmuth and i'm trying out some background techniques from it, but everything's taking FOREVER to dry!