Gel Medium Photo Transfer - Eclectic Paperie is full of inspiration this month!

First of all, you need to visit Eclectic Paperie :). I am placing the video here so that I can refer back easily.

This is the gel medium transfer challenge. I also want to try this background.....
 http://eclecticpaperie.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/wondering-how.html Cool, eh?

It's been a busy month so far! I have had a chance to be a little artsy and I hope for a little more time in the coming weeks, as I wrap up my Oncology Nursing course in the next week. We have had fun walking the spring bush, wildcrafting fiddleheads and leeks and morels and acquiring.......babies :)

Spring is the time for renewal, birthing and change. I have always loved this time of year and getting our little chicks, but we had a few surprises this year :). 

Yup, 105 chicks at one day old!

3 orphaned kittens about 3 weeks old that we are bottle feeding.

and a one yr old lab that adopted them, Koko loves her babies :)

We love our babies, says the baby in the family :)

Pop up Spring Time

 My Grandmother is 88 on Saturday and is in excellent health, living independantly and gardening like crazy. She doesn't want gifts, but I thought she might enjoy an interactive card like this.

I confess that I have had this Pop Up Die from Karen Burniston since I saw what Shelley Hickox had done with it and have wanted to play with it since. The stamp is from Artistic Outpost and they are running a challenge which I am linking to over here. My grass is a die from My favourite things as is the banner.  I sprayed the base with Lindy's Ireland green spray and popped the grass up through it. My little girl was coloured with CTMH markers and a water brush on watercolour paper and flower soft was added to her wheelbarrel. That's another of those things I bought and never really used much of. I just had to have it, lol. My lawn flowers are tissue paper cut with Tim Holtz's tatter flowers die which I bought at The Funkie Junkie.
 I think I will share this with them as well on the Sunday Share program :). I hope Grandma enjoys it and has a great day!

How'd you like those eggs?

So this is my egg sketch turned canvas. I liked it right up until I pulled out my black sketch marker and put lines on it :( Is there anyway to fix that? My poor eggs are too busy looking now.

I started out with paper collaging on a collection of scraps and white washing them. I then cut out my tree, crackle painted it and glued it down. Very cool texture,almost barkl ike, yehhhh. I used flower soft to create a haze of green on the end of the branch, with more texture and then the nest......
I was outside on the not yet green grass drinking my morning cuppa when inspiration hit. I gathered twigs up and mod podged them right onto my canvas in a nest shape. I then added my egg shapes from my sketch and some ribbon scrap from a FunkieJunkie boutique order(part of the thank you gift Linda tucks in each order, which is entirely reusable :). I smudged green, blue and brown paint randomly on the canvas before I brought out that horrid marker and wrecked it.
I think I need to revisit this subject in the future, but I am ready for my lambs! We spent a few hours at my uncles sheep farm and took TONS of pictures for that project.

Oh, My Painted Ducklings!

 I dared to bring out the watercolours for this sketch. It's not a perfect painting. funny, I see the faults. My husband doesn't. Gotta love that guy. With the gesso in the background it has a cool texture. This is with watercolour crayons.

This one will not come out the right way up, no matter what I do :P. I didn't use the gesso for it and the colours didn't blend as nicely. I like the touch of orange and I am half tempted to go back on the first one and add a little in......probably not a good idea, my 5 year old tells me!

Pencil Drawings -Ducks

 I have had fun with this challenge from Junelle in the Art of Spring lesson. We needed to draw ducks in our journals and then watercolour them. I am a chicken (no pun intended) when it comes to watercolouring, but I will share my results when I get brave enough to try. These are faint and sideways, thanks to my lack of photoediting software right now, but I hope you can see what I have accomplished.

 Lots of ducklings. I love my ducklings, I raised them as a little girl. I had a pet that followed me everywhere one summer.

This is my favourite :)

This is my youngest sons drawings in my art journal. I love the birds and his free form trees. I won't be gessoing over these ones :)

this is the inspiration for my drawing that I am going to paint. Aren't they cute?

The Art of Spring

I signed up for a course on mixed media called 'The Art of Spring" with Junelle Jacobsen (christy tomlinsons art workshops :) ). Today, a slushy, melty kinda day after a late spring storm left my boys and I in an arty kind of mood, so I managed to create a few canvas's as did they......I am going to be short with the details as, you too, could take the course, but.......

This is my first ever canvas.  I followed Junelle pretty much exactly, as I was terrified when I started. I confess that it seems too busy for me. The blue birds were painted on by my eldest son when I was almost done and I love what they add to the canvas.  The orange scarf was a piece of my watercolour play from the first lesson. Many of my veggies ended up on my small slide boxes as spring welcoming gifts for my aunties.

This is a 3*3 small, originally a slide box from the lab at work. I created a number of these but didn't take pictures. I loved this little bunny the best. It is all done with acrylic paint and marker. The pink bits are leftover dried paint that I shook on while the Mod Podge is damp.

This is my eldest sons artwork from this afternoon, as I painted. He painted this on a pre primed canvas with my acrylics, all from memory. It now hangs in his room.

This is my youngest sons work. He loves to draw/sketch houses and the goings on inside the houses, in this, I have a greenhouse with flowers growing and it is nighttime. My youngest is the director of the art committee for his SK class. They have created an art gallery that is really something to see. The school is considering a grapejuice and cheese open house to show it off. I will have to post some pic's if I can get there :).

Breaking in to Mixed Media

This is why I'm not blogging much! I was procrastinating one night and dabbled on this book cover, my first venture into mixed media. I rather like it, but blogger wont' let me rotate it :). I am studying for Oncology and I am nearly done, H'ray! I cut the globe from TH die, bought at the Funkie Junkie, the heart is cut from an old popcan that I flattened and coloured with alcohol inks (thank you Linda, the Funkie Junkie :)) and the tag with the word study on it is one of the thank you tags from Linda, flipped over, embossed with the script folder and the chipboard letters mounted on it.  I tried my hand at plaster, but I'm not satisfied with the way it worked on the leaves stencil (again Funkie Junkie!) I need to enter this in the FunkieJunkie Sunday share as I used way more than I thought from that shop, lol. You can't see the key to the cardboard heart, it seems to have blended into the burlap ribbon from close to my heart.  I stole it off a SPAM can that my husband had taken hunting.

Girl's Cruise

I went on a Girls Cruise, late Feb, early March. I recommend this to anyone....the girls part, not the cruise :P

I was rocking and rolling on land for the week after I got off the ship, even though I was fine aboard! It was rejuvenating to spend time being a girl, not a mom, not a nurse, not a  wife...Just ME!  Loved it, will do it again. I promised no people pictures, lol, so you get scenery. On the art side of things, I have stuff to get into albums, a vase of sand that I collected and I joined an art class, so I will try to remember to take pictures before I gave away my gifts. I am practicing on canvas for the first time, mixed media and sketching, Yoikes!

St Thomas, I scuba dived, sorta and snorkeled, which I loved

The Bahamas

 The Bahamas - I was seasick :(

Puerto Rico, a beautiful country, friendly people and a place I will visit again.

A beach full of these shells, breathtaking!

the ship from the beautiful beach on Grand Turk

The CN tower from the air, HOME AGAIN!

40 years of Nursing

This month we have been celebrated my mothers retirement from her Nursng Career after 40 years. It has kept me off the blog and busy planning a simple low key party for her. Now after 40 years she retired and stayed on as a casual nurse, working I am sure more than some others on staff. My mother is an amazing woman and role model for so many new grads and even experienced nurses on staff, so we did have a lot of fun putting this together.  I have a few pictures of the crafts we created for this venture. 



Above is a shadow box a friend created with mom's graduation picture and black ribbon from her old nuring hat. Below is a card I created with a picture inside of the garden arbour the staff jointly bought for her (It's hidden here and I didn't get a shot beofre she took the card).  I coloured the image with copics, wrapped the card with burlap ribbon from CTMH and created that banner with Tim's banner die.



Nursing hat candy dishes that we made and Urinals for flower vases :). Just a few peeks at what my spare time has been caught up in.

A Good Use for old Crown Jars

A quick picture of one of the jars that I transformed for gifts this year. I made a few and they left my house like they were on fire, lol. I borrowed the idea from Shelly Hickox and worked with the supplies I had on hand. All scraps :). Some from the funkie junkie and some from CTMH, some just found objects......

See the link to Shelly's here for how to create your own. I used the kraft borders from CTMH a few years ago and pour silver glitter on the tacky side for the trim around the neck and base, crackle paint on the metal rim, pipecleaner for the hat (party hat on the cricut time to party cartridge ;)), the bells and the ribbon I believe were from the funkie junkie boutique, as well as the red twine and maybe the blue crackle paint. I know that I got some of it there and all of it is available :)
I filled mine with snowball cookies, marshmallows and hotchocolate, crafting supplies, whatever fit through the hole.

Next year I think I will try a snow globe effect.......

I think I will link this to the FrillyandFunkies Sunday share.