Pockets full of blackberries

Hello all, just a quick post to share these little blackberry pocket envelopes with you.  They're full of tasty blackberries, some of them ripe enough to pop straight in your mouth, others that are going to need a few days yet...

I used my PaperArtsy botanical stamps, EAB24 Blackberries Edition.  They're stamped onto some fairly cheap watercolour card and I had a lovely time watercolouring them with Distress Inks. 

The pockets are cut with Tim Holtz's Collector Thinlits set, and I used my stamping platform when I was stamping and painting, so that I would be able to recapture any details lost in the process.

I played with both Distress Ink pads and some Distress Stains (not the sprays - I still have some of the old ones in dabber bottles), smooshed onto the craft mat and spritzed with a little water. 

My trusty Pentel water brushes were perfect for being able to add extra water for shading as I went.

There's Seedless Preserves, Wilted Violet, and touches of Villainous Potion and Crackling Campfire on the berries; Peeled Paint, Bundled Sage and Crushed Olive for the leaves and stems... 

... and a little Broken China to hint at the sky.  Watery Vintage Photo gives the paper an aged look. 

The same paper, this time dipped in slightly less watery Vintage Photo looks almost like leather as the fasteners. Simple fine twine loops around to fasten them.

Simple to do, but I think they look really effective, and you could use them as little gift card wallets or to store little photos and ephemera.

Thanks for stopping by today - I hope you're all doing well, and I'll see you again soon.  

On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads.

Charles Dickens

Marvellously Rusty

Hello all!  I'm very happy you enjoyed Going for a walk in the meadows.  Today we're heading in to a secret garden.

I'm delighted to be sharing a project as Guest Designer for the new challenge at The Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog (formerly Frilly and Funkie).

I was thrilled when my miniatures piece Around the Fireplace was selected as their winner last month, and so happy when I heard that the theme I'd be guesting on would be Marvellous Metallics, hosted by the brilliant Jenny of Pushing the Right Buttons.

My metallic preference generally leads me towards weathering and decay, so I've gone marvellously rusty with this tall tag.















I started with a tag from one of the Prima Tag Pads, 8 x 3.5inches, which comes printed with this lovely vintage script collage.

















Over that I layered a wash of gesso and applied some DecoArt Crackle Paint with a palette knife.
















From there, I simply did some dribbling and spritzing with Distress Sprays in Peeled Paint and Bundled Sage, allowing the ink to sink down into the cracks.














Later on, I did some dipping and splattering too, and stamped my favourite Rubber Dance weeds in Olive Archival.

I didn't really want to cover it up much after that...















... except to add some white splatter and some white paint around the edge, and some gesso'd tissue tape to anchor my embellishments into the tag.

It's a subtle softening of the look, but I rather like it so I wanted to show you the difference this stage made.








So, on to those embellishments...  I twisted some rusty wire into a rustic oval frame, just right for the Idea-ology girl to perch on.

She's from the Ancestors set, intended for Halloween, but I find her melancholy rather than creepy.









Anyway, she seemed about right as the girl hiding away in her secret garden...


















... a hidden place, a little decayed and run to seed.















To make sure I had plenty of "marvellous metallics" I picked out some metal cogs and gears and started to rust them up.













I smeared on some textured sand paste in places to provide the underlying texture...















... and then got busy with DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylics in Quinacridone Gold and Payne's Grey to get the rusty colour tones I wanted.













I'm really happy with the results and it didn't take long at all.  It's a great way to lift some cheap metal embellishments onto a new mixed media level.














I couldn't resist adding some of my favourite dried flowers (Baby's Breath, I think somebody in the comments called them last time I used them?).
















The sprigs add a lovely delicate touch of dimension and echo the flowers the girl is clutching.














It's one of my own PaperArtsy quote stamps providing the words.  This one is a Charlotte Brontë quote from EAB07 Dreaming & Doing.













A scrap of lace and a twist of twine finish things off at the top of the tag and that's pretty much that.













Do check out the fabulous projects from the Design Team over at the Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog, and I hope you'll be inspired to play with some Marvellous Metallics too.

Thanks so much for stopping by today and I'll see you again soon.

If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.
Henry Hazlitt

A sword, a spade, and a thought should never be allowed to rust.
James Stephens

I'd like to join in again with the Splatters and Splodges theme at Try It On Tuesday - I'm always splattering and splodging!
And at Tag Tuesday the new theme hosted by Joan is Summer Fun - what could be better than a peaceful afternoon in a summer's garden?

Going for a walk

Hello all!  I'm just making it in under the wire with my entry for this month's Art Journal Journey theme.  I promised myself I'd play along at least once a month this year but the lovely Chris of PearShapedCrafting slightly stumped me with her "We're All Going..." theme.  It's a lovely idea, and opened up lots of possibilities for everyone, but I found myself paralysed between two phrases which really didn't inspire me at all.

Firstly, there was "We're all going on a summer holiday... " - thanks for that earworm, Cliff Richard! - but that just isn't true for me this year.  And then there was "We're all going to hell in a handcart," which seems a lot more apt for the current state of world affairs, but was far too depressing for me to want to start journalling about.  I know that you can use art journalling for all kinds of emotions and expressivity - but, just at the moment, I prefer to escape from nightmarish reality when I head into the craft-room, rather than take it in there with me.

In the end, with July rapidly running out of days, I decided my best bet was to run for my happiest possible artsy place, so on my art journalling page we're all going for a walk in the meadow.  When the world is looking dark, some sunlight and a gentle breeze are sometimes all that's needed to feel a little more cheerful.







This is a heavily textured page, since I started with a thick coat of watercolour ground to prepare the page for using watercolour paints.  It gives you a deliciously grainy, sandy texture which also allows the pigment to flow as though you had watercolour paper.

It means you can get lovely soft background effects before applying more detail in later layers.













The paper in this large 10x10 inch album from Paperchase is already sturdy (it's the same book as has the Inspiring Herbs and Wild and Organic pages), but the ground gives you even more weight and texture. 











Watercolours are the main medium here.  At this stage, that's all that's on the page, apart from the watercolour ground itself... but then I moved on to a more mixed media approach.














There are some nice thick applications of heavy body acrylic to create texture in the flower heads.















I love the dimension and movement this gives you.
















I used some large PITT artist pens to add some variation in line to some of the stems...














... as well as adding some soft blue flower heads to the distant stems in the background.  














And it wanted warming up a bit so I added some of my favourite Broken China Distress Stain, creating turquoise shading beneath the flower heads as well as deepening the colour of the sky.
















There's some script stamping in Olive Archival adding texture to the undergrowth.














I used my dipping pen and some Turtle Dove Grey ink by Colorex to write the words, which are layered over some torn strips of tissue tape.












I've no nearby meadows to head into in real life, so the craft table version will just have to do for now when I need to escape.

I hope you've enjoyed coming for a walk with me, and I'll be back soon with some exciting posts in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned and happy crafting in the meantime!









In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
Jonas Mekas

I'd like to share this over at Art Journal Journey for this month's theme of "We're All Going..."
At the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge, they're looking for projects which are Bright and Cheerful - my sunshine meadow has made me feel a little more cheerful about the world, so I'd like to play along there too
I'd also like to share this at Paint Party Friday - continuing to work on expanding my experience with watercolours, and also exploring how they fit in with my mixed media work

A Need for Neutrals

Hello all, and welcome.  It's time for the start of a new challenge over at A Vintage Journey and the fabulous Nikki is inviting us to enter The Neutral Zone.

Not much persuasion needed here at Words and Pictures, of course - I'm in the neutral zone as often as not!

But I've been playing with quite a lot of colour while away in NYC - watercolour that you'll get a glimpse of later in the post - so it was lovely to get back to my own craft table and play with all the neutral goodies waiting there for me.

This jumbo tag also fulfils a (nearly) year-old promise.  You may remember this Celebration of Friendship, created to celebrate the 60 years of friendship between my mother and her friend, Inge.

The lavender accordion card went to Inge, and I've been on a promise to create something similar for Cestina to keep.

I'm not very good at REmaking a project... once that initial inspiration has been played out, it always feels a little stale to make a direct copy.  Happily, Cestina loves this tag, a variation on the friendship theme, with lots of elements in common with that original accordion card.

And you'll see at the end of the post that I've made sure that she has some lavender too!









When I say there were neutral goodies "waiting for me", I really mean it.  These two girls and the frame almost made an appearance on my Becoming More tag.  You may remember I shared a photo of their brief stay on the half-made tag.

But back in February, I changed direction and went with the butterflies instead, so they were there on the craft table, ready and waiting.  I started by grabbing an MDF tag, 8.5 x 4 inches, and layering them onto it with some other unused/leftover bits and bobs which were lying around.











My first thought these days when I hear "neutrals" is probably grey - soft greys, warm greys, beige greys - and of course white, my favourite neutral of all.











For the background, I gave the tag the DecoArt chalky crackle treatment.  Artefact, the darkest of these three colours formed the base coat, and then I applied the lighter two (but mostly the white Everlasting) over the top of the Crackle Glaze.












I stamped the lovely Rubber Dance wildflower weeds over the resulting weathered crackle, and I love the look of it at this stage.

It's stamped in Potting Soil Archival (brown being the other neutral which obsesses me), and there's some inking around the sanded edges too.













In the end, I did add a wash of white paint over the whole thing to knock it back, as the background was in danger of upstaging the collaged elements.














When I made the Celebration of Friendship, I had to print out the quotes myself, but now of course I have many of them available as rubber stamps as part of my new PaperArtsy EAB10 collection Friends & Friendship.












This wonderful Kahlil Gibran quote appeared on the accordion.  Here it is stamped in Hickory Smoke, and layered up over some of my favourite wire mesh.












The die-cut wildflower didn't make it onto the recent Yellow Wallflowers journalling page spread, because I decided to go with all daisies for that one.

There's some very delicate Hickory Smoke shading done with Distress Stain, inking around the edges and lots of white splatter adding texture.













The frame and the panel have had some washes of white paint too, as well as getting in the splatter firing line.  And I added some tiny dandelion stamping to the frame, also from the Rubber Dance Weed Love set.













The large panel is "screwed down" with some of the useful flat-backed Idea-ology Hardware Heads.  A couple of drops of Mushroom alcohol ink soften the silvery finish to an aged rusty look.











The punched butterfly has some more of the Hickory Smoke Distress Stain shading, and some tiny wire antennae so he knows where he's going.














These two girls narrowly missed out on being one of the pairs on the Celebration of Friendship accordion, so I'm very happy they are now getting to be part of the fun, though in a larger size.















At the top of the tag, there's a file clip, weathered with some white acrylic paint.













And there's plenty of wild tangled thread adding a sense of movement to the whole thing.















I love how the Idea-ology Layers give everything so much dimension with their sturdy thickness, and they make it so easy to create a dynamic composition with lots of lovely vintage style.















Oops, I almost forgot... I was going to show you how Cestina is getting the lavender bit of her commemorative artwork, so that she matches Inge's collection - but we will have to step out of the Neutral Zone temporarily.













She'll get one of these small lavender field paintings (four pictures on a side of A4 paper) to frame.  I'll show them to you in more detail some time soon, along with some of the other (obsessive) watercolouring I've been doing.

But back to the neutrals now.  Thank you so much for stopping by today.  I hope you like this gentle tag as much as I do.

As always, there's lots of glorious inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides over at A Vintage Journey, so do check it all out.  And we do hope you'll come and join us in The Neutral Zone this month.  Happy neutral crafting everybody!

The fundamental grey, which differentiates the masters, expresses them, is the soul of all colour. 
Odilon Redon

If I see everything in grey, and in grey all the colours which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other colour? I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with grey. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one colour after another, and what has remained is grey, grey, grey!
Alberto Giacometti




The Simply Neutrals Tuesday party over at Apple Apricot is going to be taking a break, so I'm delighted that I just managed to squeeze something into this final month before the pause
I'd like to play along at the Bleeding Art Challenge where, this month, Anything Goes
Anything Mixed Media Goes too, as always, at the Creative Artiste Mixed Media Challenge