making something out of nothing and Bernie Berlin

Today's ATC was a major "what if".

Sorry about the reflection. but it is a bit shiny.
Way back here, when I was painting the page around the niche in my artbook, I put a piece of acetate underneath to stop paint getting onto the page below.
Another day, I was tidying my desk and found the piece of acetate with dried black paint and the rectangle looked just like an ATC.  I thought, what if I scratch into the acetate?  So I did and this is the result (paint side is down of course, so if you write it needs to be backward)
I have used a piece of batting, cut to size, wrapped some paperbacked foil over it, added a playing card at the back and attached the scratched acetate with brads. 
For a little bit of work, it has a great effect.

Now to Bernie Berlin, Author of Artist Trading Card Workshop
I have been trying out one of her exercises, using watercolour (I vaguely remember doing something similar many years ago when I was learning watercolour)

Here is a piece of watercolour paper which I dampened and dripped paint on then let it bleed and run.

Then I got a piece of heavy card that I had made an ATC size frame out of (2.5 x 3.5 in inside)
and moved it around the paper, to see what I could find.  You might want to rotate the paper and the frame quite regularly, because It will make an huge difference to what you see.  This might be a volcano erupting.

This looks like a little fish to me.  He is missing a tail, but that gives me something to embellish.

This one looks like two people, a woman on the left and a man on the right.

A princess standing under a tree?
The idea is to find pictures in the blobs and highlight them.
Here are some I have worked on.

After the earthquake, a pagoda is burning

Two people watching snow fall?

An Angel in the garden or maybe up in the clouds?

And a full moon through the trees.

I had a lot of fun with this technique, It certainly gets your brain thinking.  A good way to start off the day in my skeychbook, so you might see a few of these type of ATCs popping up now and then.

Remember creativity doesn't always have a plan.  Making it up as you go along can sometimes get your creativity moving.

A harlequin and some painting messes

This one was inspired by lisa's one here 
When I found these little bits of card already cut into diamonds, I knew what I had to do!  Luckily they fit nicely across one way.  When I was looking at it deciding whether to put another row cut in half, I had a lightbulb moment and thought about the stitching.
Black cotton, glitter coloured card, perle thread.

And some more painting!!!
After I had printed on all the different surfaces, I decided to paint the scraps to use in collage.

Light Lutradur.  I liked the way the watercolour bled here.

A few face wipes.  I was dropping watercolour onto damp fabric from dropper bottles.  With these, I scrunched them afterwards to blend the drops a bit.

A gorgeous piece of inferfacing.

A piece of fusible.  This might come in handy as an overlay in a landscape as it is so subtle, but really, my watercolours were too dilute for the normal painted fusible effects....... but

This is the release paper. and I am in love with this!  I will just have to try and repeat it.  Obviously, if the paint is too dilute, it just settles into the paper, but this paper is gorgeous.

A nappy liner, which is very pastelly and had a similar problem to the fusible.  Too many holes, but is very filmy and nice.
and a last piece of interfacing, which was a bit too wet, but again had lovely edges where the watercolour dried.
At least with these,  I can always add more layers if  I'm not happy, but all in all it was a productive session.

Lots of materials for fabric collages!  Perhaps I'd better make a few.
I am going away for a few days, to visit with my mother, but will still be posting.

As Lisa says, be creative

Some origami and some more printing

mono printed fabric, origami hexagon in white satin, bead, transparency transfer The transfer is the japanese character for 'folding'.

When I was printing on the tissue paper, I also tried some other surfaces that I had been going to do for a while.  And, yes, Judy, one of them was fusible, lol.  thanks.

This one was printing on light interfacing.  The main problem I had with this is that the rollers pulled the fibres off the surface and jammed the machine.  In the end, I had to fold a piece of tissue and fix it at the top, so the fibres didn't catch, and as you can see, I got a good print - missing the first inch or so of course.

 This one was on Tyvek and it worked extremely well.  The print was really sharp and clear.

This was on nappy liner, and although it looks as though it printed well, most of the ink went straight through and only a wer faint print remained.  This is just too thin!

This one was on fusible and printed really well.   This is one of the things I had been wanting to try for ages.
This picture also highlights something I learned whilst doing this.  The paper you use as a carrier does not have to be a full lenght.  you can see here, I have reused a piece of paper and it is shorter because I cut off the previously glued  bit at the top (which is now the bottom)

This one is on a polyester non woven (or light lutradur)  This tended to bleed a bit.  After I had done it, I remembered that it is better to coat it with some medium or PVA before you print to get a sharper print.  I'm pretty sure you told me that, Judy.  As you can see a lot of the ink went straight through - although this paper will make a nice distressed print for collaging.

This one is a heavy Lutradur and i didn't use a carrier for it.  It went through and printed well, except, where it had been folded in the packet, tended to pick up ink from the heads.  I will have to work out a way of getting the folds out, perhaps a warm iron with a bit of mist?  or pressing under some books.

The last one is tyvek paper, which also did not need a carrier.  It has a totally different texture to tyvek fabric and appears more like a very smooth lutradur, which has been pressed.  (Which it probably basically is as they are both polyester fibres.  Although the image was good, it did bleed a little.

So now, my poor printer has printed on just about everything over the last year!
As you can see, I have done most of my prints at around ATC size, so you will probably see many of these prints cropping up through the year.  I'm sure to manipulate them in unimaginable ways, so you might have too look hard to recognise them, lol.


“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” — Edward de Bono

A bit of ribbon and some tissue.

 Today I went to a meeting of ATASDA Vic (Australian textile art and surface design association),  so hi to any of you surfing the web.  We had a great day and had a silk paper demo from Elma who creates lichen inspired sculptures using crochet.  Fascinating
Today's ATC is decidedly floral

I used a piece of the collage background I made here.  The flower is some rolled organza and satin petals and the text is printed on a transparency.  bound with organza ribbon. 

I followed a link from Lisa's blog to that of an extraordinary artist, Marilyn rock.  I was inspired to create some stamped tissue papers like she showed in her video, but I decided instead to print on the tissue with my computer.

 As you can see, they printed quite well.  I actually used greaseproof or kitchen paper instead of tissue, but I'm sure if you ironed the tissue out flat it would work.  I just tend to use kitchen paper for layering tissue as it's cheap and works well.  The images I used were from  the graphics fairy.

I used a gluestick to glue the paper to the top of a piece of printer paper.  (I put an oversized piece of tisse paper on and trimmed it down after I glued it)
I found it ran through the printer quite easily.

And as you can see the print is excellent.  I can't wait to use these in collage.  I did find, however that the images bled if I used matte medium, but if I used neat white glue, this was minimised, But I will show more about this in a later post.

Thanks for the lovely comments yesterday.  As always, it is the supposed mistakes that people like the best, lol, but I appreciate them all the same.

Now, I need to get into my sketchbook because I have an idea for my balance challenge!


Have fun creating - and do it all the time!

In the toy box and watercolour

another simple fabric card

As you can see, my tranfer went much better this time.  toy theme fabric, vintage boat embroidery/applique, transparency transfer.  Buttons.
Aren't these the cutest little buttons?  A friend gave them to me and I just had to use them they were so cute!

I have been doing a bit of playing with paint, mostly for use in my artbooks and in fabric books.
With this paper, I wet my paper first  (too wet as we shall see) then dropped watercolour randomly all over it and let it move.  Then I applied different things to them as they dried.

Here they are with their additions, drying.

This part of the paper had bubble wrap added whilst drying

This sectioon had salt crystals added

This section had scrunched gladwrap (saran in us)

This section had nothing added.
As you can see from the dried pieces, the colour faded a lot.  Water colour does become less bright as it dries, but my mistake here was to over wet the paper so it took a very long time to dry and as a result, the colours spread too far and became washed out.
Although I did not get quite what I was after, the pastel washed out paper, will come in useful for backgrounds.

Of course mishaps like this always lead to more 'what if...'s'  than I have time to complete.  what do you think about living to 150?  Do you think I'll get bored by then?

Transfers and tinkering

I am much better today.  Unfortunately when I get stressed, my back sometimes plays up.  At least when it is stress, it get better as soon as I relax and get rest!
today's ATC is a bit imperfect.

I used a bit too much gel with my transfer and it bled into the fabric a bit, oops.
Cotton cat theme fabric, transparency transfer, wooden cat shaped button, perle thread.  This reminds me of my cat, who is afraid of anything, including a wisp of air and especially, the main culprit,

Thumper, the bunny, who chases her around the house! (The cat has learned to move around the house from one high place to another, lol)

Now on to some stuff.  I said yesterday that Tony had pulled some electrical stuff apart for me.  I am collecting little bits to make some (very) mixed media collages.
Here is my desk this morning!!!

This deconstructing of things to use them is a very messy business, perhaps it should be called messy media in my case instead of mixed media
Here are a few of the items which I have collected and intend to use on these pieces.

These are the chips out of computers.  originally, I just wanted to decorate the square and rectangular tops as central motifs, but when they came out I turned them over and there were all these tiny pins, which made me think of weaving patterns with thread on them (or wire)

These things are all called heat sinks.  I suppose they are to stop things getting to hot when the electricity goes through.  But I love the shapes and patterns on them.  Colour is not really an issue as the colours you see here are just skin deep and I can make them any colour I want, but I really love the pink tree shaped one!

On the left are two reflective disks from cd rom drives.  I can't wait to stitch them down.  The circles at the top right are faces from computers fans.  and the beautiful coils at the bottom were in the battery compartment of an old tape player.  I love spirals.

I have a big collection of these fan blades.  I think they will fit in very well in a garden collage after a bit of painting and embellishing.

Now, these, were some very conservative heat sinks which I almost didn't keep, but I decided the holes might be useful for adding interesting stitching to.

These are some of my favourite bits.  They are sets of coils from motors and fans and are like little flowers with beautiful metallic petals.  They are all different sizes and numbers of spokes and colours.  The two silver things were holding one of the coils in place, and I liked them, too.

Last, but not least, this is my pride and joy and will be the centrepiece in a collage one day.  It is a set of coils, like the ones just above, but it is from an old 5 and a 1/4  floppy disk drive (think 1980 type computers!)  I hate to think how many of these drives I have turfed over the years!

Anyway, you can see what madness my husband and I get up to when we work together, can't you?  I don't know whether I'm a bad influence on him, or he is a bad influence on me, but we certainly get up to no good with old junk.  I do love making something from stuff that is junk to any other house in town, lol.

now that I have got all that madness off my chest, will we get back to "normal" stuff tomorrow? - you will have to see.

Remember, one person's trash is another person's treasure, or perhaps should we say anyone's trash is an artist's treasure?

Tick tock time's passing...

today's ATc is a simple card about time.

clock pictures, letter stickers, scrapbooking paper on a playing card. 
Brigitte, I store my ATCs in a very large folder with trading card pockets made out of tape and plastic.  And, yes, Janet, they are slightly curved and when put together create huge interlocking rings.
Thanks, everyone for looking in.  I do appreciate it.
Unfortunately, nothing to show today as I have a very sore back and didn't get to the list I had for today, but Tony did pull some electrical components apart for me and I will show you my little treasures for mixed media when I am a bit better.