Get Artsy

Seriously, I can't keep up with my life anymore! I have so much to share but have had precious little time to get anything posted here to my blog. I'm here today trying to remedy that at least a little!

I'm taking the Get Artsy class by Mou Saha over at Big Picture Classes.  This class combines two of my favorite things - scrapbooking and mixed media techniques. Up til now I've kept these two hobbies separate, so I thought I'd give this class a try to see how I felt about mixing it up.

Week 1:

Week one we were to use a gessoed background with gelatos (a stick form of watercolor) to create a background. I didn't have the gelatos yet, so I used my Neocolor Watercolor crayons.  After the color is applied you can use a stencil and a baby wipe to remove color to create a reverse resist (see those little butterflies just above the photo?). I didn't get exactly the look I was going for because I didn't have enough stencils on hand to do what I wanted. But I was still very pleased with the final result.

Week 2:

This layout was a result of my Studio purge/memorabilia review last month.  I came across a "love letter" I had written to my twins when they were toddlers. I excerpted the portion that was just to Rachel for this layout.

Week two had us using gel medium for collage (lower right corner of the white canvas) and for a resist technique with watercolors (chevron upper left corner).  I learned that gel medium works so much better for collage than mod podge and dries without the stickiness that has been causing so many of my art journal pages to stick together. Good thing to know!  This layout (because of drying time between layers) took all day.

I'm rapidly learning that I don't really like mixing mixed media with scrapbooking.  Although I love the results of these two layouts, this is definitely too fussy and time-consuming for scrapbook pages (let's face it, I LOVE Digi!) and because I still want to tell a story with words and photos I'm finding that you really have to PLAN placement of elements to make a balanced layout. Doing mixed media just for fun doesn't have those kind of constraints and I can just go with the flow more.

I still intend to finish out the class and participate in all the exercises, but I'm happy to have learned that after this, I'll likely be keeping these separate.

I've also learned that I'm rapidly running out of my butterfly stash! Oh no! So to all my bloggy friends here's a heads up... my birthday is May 29th... and I'm almost out of butterflies...  Seriously, just kidding.  Sort of. ;-)