The Art After Christmas

Today was a day set aside for relaxation and art — my favorite kind of day.  With background music provided by the Judge and Ellie, who played her new autoharp, I put together a basket of supplies in my trashed beyond belief all belief soon to be reorganized studio and brought them upstairs so I could hang out with everyone while I played.

This week’s theme at Wednesday Stamper is an open theme, so I decided to work on a little folded book I’ve been prepping for the last few weeks.  It’s made from a serious of small canvases that have been hinged together, and I had used tones of white and beige to give each "page" a uniform look.

This is the cover page, which is titled "You Cannot Always See Their Wings."

You_cannot_always_see_their_wings_3

The only other page I finished today — I worked on lots of bits and pieces here and there — is this page.

Bees_never_lie_2

You can click on the pictures below to see just the tag, the tag back, and the background page with the tag removed.

Bees_never_lie_tag_4
Bees_never_lie_tag_back_2    Bees_never_lie_background_3

All of this art made Ollie want to paint, so I pulled out my watercolors for him, and we sat down on the floor, he painting and me rubber stamping on a painted canvas. At some point, we became inspired to paint on the stamps and stamp with them, and got really beautiful, watercolor images.  This made me wonder why I had never tried it before, as the images were really wonderful.

I realized why I hadn’t done it before, when Ollie pulled out a new stamp and I watercolored on it, only to have the paint bead up and refuse to make an image.  It was stamping and then painting on the stamp without cleaning it off that made the watercolor paint take to the stamp.

So there you have it, my serendipitous discovery of a new technique as a holiday present to all of you!  The stamp pad I was using happened to be a Brilliance pad in platinum — I’m not sure if the type of pad makes a difference.  Here is an example to give you the idea.

Bird

I also got a cool sort of resist image, by watercoloring on a page, and then taking a dry stamp and sort of twisting it on the page.

Reverse

I love how the page says "paper doll friends at last" at the top and am sure I’ll be cutting this one up to use in a collage.  I could also see using both of these techniques in the book for altered books — if you play with it just a little bit you’ll find that it is very easy, and gives consistent, predictable results.

If you end up playing with this technique, please show it on your blog or picture trail, and link to it in the comments so I can check it out!   

Posted in Art

24 thoughts on “The Art After Christmas

  1. Absolutely gorgeous! And Miss Ellie has an autoharp? Tell her that I used to have one. I played with it with my children’s choirs. I need to get another one- then Ellie and I could play together!
    Karen

  2. i like that blue page!!! i also arted yesterday for a button card swap. it was a good relaxing day for me, too. enjoy!!!

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