Finishing Out Get Artsy & Starting "Being Me"

I used the techniques in Week 4 to create my OLW pages for May.

Week 5 covered water colors and week 6 was about India inks.  I combined both of those lessons techniques (most of which I was very familiar with) to create this art journal layout:

The layout is actually my week 1 assignment for Being Me.  Lots of ladies are still signing up for this 52 week free course about loving yourself. Week 2 has been posted and I can say based on the first two weeks that there is plenty of good stuff happening here even if you just want to do the assignments in a notebook and not get artsy with it at all.  And if you want to get inspired, there is a good bit of creativity being shared on the Facebook group!

Having finished "Get Artsy" I can say I definitely enjoyed the class and love the layouts I created in response to the assignments. But I don't expect to see any more of these type of layouts appearing in my scrapbook albums any time soon. I prefer the freedom of using all the art stuff on art journal pages or mixed media work  where the final result is less important to me in terms of telling a story.  For scrapbooking, I think I'm really a digi girl at heart.

One Little Word Blog Hop - May

Whether you arrived here from Lee's Blog as part of the One Little Word Blog Hop, or you are here because you love me and drop by regularly... Welcome! I love visitors! The One Little Word Blog Hop is a monthly hop run by Lee for members of Ali Edwards' One Little Word class over at Big Picture Classes. The hop goes live on Saturday at 6:00 a.m.  You can always check back later if someone's post isn't live yet.

The May assignment for One Little Word was to listen to the messages that we are getting from the Universe that resonate with us and to capture those on little artsy cards.  I waited until nearly the end of the month to actually execute the assignment, but spent the whole month listening for those messages. I used techniques from the  Get Artsy class by Mou Saha over at Big Picture Classes to create the background for my cards and then added washi tape and a few little embellishments at the end. This is what I came up with:

It is nearly impossible to tell from the photo, but the word "Joy" and the butterflies are a shiny blue foil transparency material and really add some sparkle and shine to the spread. The background was created using watercolors and modeling paste with a stencil.

My major "DARE" for May was to participate in and complete the LOAD challenge. And I did! At least one new layout every day for 31 days. And if I include the 33 pages that I completed for Sarah's baby album, my total for the month (I haven't finished counting yet) is about 70 pages! That is a record for me.

To close out May, here's my tracker: 

I'm still eating mostly Paleo and doing very well with it. Those four little sad face days are the ones that I indulged in dessert of some sort.  But hey, if you are having your birthday dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, you really HAVE to finish it off with a piece of cheesecake, right?

If you are continuing on in the hop, your next stop is  Naomi's  Blog.

And just in case you get lost, here's the entire list:

Lee: http://thelinarstudio.typepad.com/embracelife

Cheri: http://cheriandrews.blogspot.com

Naomi: http://www.poeticaperture.com

Margareta: http://www.paperpilekitten.com

Missus Wookie: http://mrswookieswanderings.blogspot.com

Lisa: http://backtoallen.com/category/challenges/one-little-word

Michelle: http://www.table-for-five.com/

Melanie: http://mellybirddesigns.wordpress.com/

Veronica: http://www.veronicanorris.typepad.com/

Kelly: http://www.septemberblue.net/

Get Artsy #3

Week 3 technique was playing with modeling paste. I used a doily stencil with a very thin layer of paste scraped across the doily with an old credit card.  I originally had a bunch more words to put on but it started feeling crowded so I eliminated some.  Do you think this layout could have handled more word strips?

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. ;-)