Enchanted Forest Colouring and WOYWW #349

Good morning fellow Deskers!

Not a Desker? You're missing out - pop over to Julia's blog at The Stamping Ground and get involved.

Just a quickie today as Mum and Dad are visiting.

Not much change from last time, except that I have finally started work in my Enchanted Forest colouring book, which No. 1 Son gave me for Christmas.

In the front right you can see my colour swatch book where I've listed all my coloured pencils, still a few gaps to be filled in, but Mother's Day is rapidly approaching, I shall drop some not very subtle hints! The pages you can see are for my Faber-Castell Polychromos, but the coloured pencil aficionados amongst you will recognise that  the pencils on the desk are Derwent Academy - I'm having to mix and match brands to get as many foliage colours as I can.

Here's a close up of my first attempt. I'm aiming for on the cusp of late summer and early autumn, when the foliage is just beginning to turn...

I've also been stepping right outside my comfort zone and trying to improve my doodling and hand lettering skills...

Still a ways to go, but I'm pleased with my progress so far.


Must dash, I'll catch up with you later. Have a happy WOYWW!

Hugs

Oh help, how does this blog thingy work - I've forgotten (WOYWW 364)

Well helloooo...

Anybody there?

Remember me? Li'l Ole Maisie (MM)?

Yep I know it's been a while (eek) but I'm back. (After some "oh help I've forgotten my password" aggravation!

I'm not going to bore you with the whys and wherefores of my long absence but I will show you my Wednesday morning desk...

Nothing much has changed, once I'd beaten the dust bunnies in to submission anyway! Still the same old set-up in front of the camera, behind and to the right it's a bit more umm, shall we say, congested, and leave it at that?

On my desk you can see my current pet project, my Bullet Journals (BuJos) (one for business and one for personal stuff). I won't say much about them here but I'm sure I'll be posting about them in the future. On the far right you can see my collage art journal, which is about the only creative thing I have dabbled with since I was last blogging regularly. Behind it is a stack of magazine clippings to be used in my collage journal. They are waiting to be filed away. More on my collage journal in another post, perhaps.

The plastic wallet with the red zip is my BuJo pack - it contains the stamps and pens I use regularly in my journals, so I don't have to keep trawling through my stash to find them.

This is a shot of one of my January Daily pages, notice WOYWW is there as a task for today!

That's all for now, I'm looking forward to catching up with you all again.

Much love

Not so Messy Monochrome

Hello and welcome.

I have been in somewhat of a creative slump lately and not spent much time in my craft room, but I have been enjoying the delights of YouTube and the hours of amazing videos of other people's creativity. Just entering "mixed media" in the search box has turned up loads of inspiration and some interesting artists.

One in particular is Jennibellie and I have decided to join her Journal Workshop ning site. One of the groups on the site is the Monthly Challenge and the challenge for this month is to create a messy monochrome art journal spread with the use of a maximum of two highlight colours.

OK - so as my post title suggests, I didn't score too highly on the messy part of the challenge - but this is where the inspiration took me, and after such a dry spell, I went with it...

The background is Dylusions Black Marble, and, although you can barely see it there are also random stampings of various Kaiser Craft texture stamps in Jet Black StazOn. Additional texture was added by flicking water splashes on the Dylusions and then picking up the colour with kitchen towel.

The trees are white and green acrylic paint and applied thorough the Crafter's Workshop  TCW171 Tree of Life template. The green tree was outlined with charcoal pencil and over painted with Cosmic Shimmer Meadow Lush mist to give a hint of shimmer.

I'm making a real effort to do some stash busting this year so I've used letter stickers from my stash for the page title. The white letters are American Craft Remarks "Sarah Script" and the green letters are Making Memories green Puffy Alphas. I coloured over the Puffy Alphas with Promarkers to try and match the green to the tree a little better (It changed colour from a yellow green when I applied the shimmer mist).

Finishing touches were to outline the white letters with a fine black pen, outline the green letters with white ink, apply watered down white acrylic splashes over the whole page (masking the green tree first), draw a line and dots border around the page with a Posca paint pen and finally add three die cut felt bird embellishments.

It isn't a messy monochrome but I'm really pleased to have felt creative again!

Thanks for looking.

WOYWW #254

Good grief is that the time! The Minor Moonshines are on school holidays at the moment and I must confess it is all very chilled out here at Moonshine Manor - so much so that I had no idea it was a quarter to two - must go and make some lunch!

Before I do that though, here is a quick look at what is on my workdesk this gorgeous, sunny and warm Wednesday - to be honest there is more activity on the washing line today, but since I have actually managed to produce something creative this week I thought I would share it with you. (Why? go here to find out).

I've been playing in my art journal, and this is my page for a challenge over at Jennibellie's new  Journal Workshop Ning site.

Short and sweet today - just as our hostess likes it, hope the weather is lovely where you are.

Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2014 - March

Uh Oh - scraping in under the wire with this one methinks!

This month Tim has demonstrated two different stamping techniques on his tag, the first being "smudge" stamping (where you deliberately smudge your still wet inked image to give a blurred vintage effect) and the second, using the smudge technique on second generation stamping (re-using your stamp after making the initial impression without re-inking your stamp, to give a softer less intense image - great for backgrounds).

You can see Tim's original Tag here.

Once again I was sans stash for this project but when I saw the freebie stamps that came with this month's Creative Stamping magazine, I couldn't 1.) resist and 2.) NOT use them for this project!

So here is my take on Tim's March Tag...

You see what I mean about the freebie stamps?

I haven't added any dimensional embellishments to my second generation tag as I plan to use it in a journal spread and want to keep it flat on the page.

My smudging didn't work particularly well, you can see it best on the tiny butterfly just above the reef knot.

The next two shots are just to illustrate the difference between first impression and second generation stamped images.

Tim's stamp set has a plain egg shape for the background and a second speckled stamp for the detail - mine didn't, but my index and little finger ends were the perfect size and shape!

Sorry I couldn't take any more shots, my camera batteries ran out :0(

Well that's it from me, off to post my link - I think I've still got time...

March Calendar Girl

Hello and welcome.

Apologies for my long absence - I've been busy sewing for a Spring craft fair so I haven't been doing much paper crafting lately.

I have managed to complete a couple of projects, so here is the first of two very quick posts, the first being my March Calendar Girl...

March 20th was the first day of spring here in the UK and I wanted to reflect this with my colour palette, so I chose yellow and green to represent the daffodils and primroses coming in to flower in my garden.

I'm still on my quest to do a bit of stash busting this year and have used a Dovecraft chip board frame, some of  my miles and miles of ribbon, a couple of random blooms and a wood veneer bird. The stamps are from Studio G.

Better start thinking about my April Girl ... hmmm

WOYWW #248

Hello and welcome, fellow workdesk wanderers.

We are, as ever, hosted by the amazing Ms Dunnit over at The Stamping Ground - do go there to find out how to play along.

I'm in a bit of a creative slump at the moment, so although there is a lot of stuff on my desk there isn't really much action, but here it is anyway...

I'm working on my March Calendar Girl - a Spring themed tag - not going brilliantly at the moment - but I shall persevere. Hope your desk is more inspiring than mine - let me know you came and I'll pop over later.