Art Journal | Inspiration Station

It’s time for a project from another Inspiration Station challenge, where my sister and I select a theme, and each of us creates something inspired by the theme.  It was my sister’s turn to pick the inspiration this month, and she made a mood board for us from the pictures that inspired her.

We also created a logo for our challenge because, why not? (And because we were bored one day.) 😉 We used a project from each of us for the sections.

For this month’s Inspiration Station, it was the content that interested me more than the colors – circles, patterns and flowers – and I intended to make an art journal page with them. For the longest time, I kept thinking of a design with patterns along the left half of the page, and some poppies on the right half. But the design just felt off, and I kept postponing my project. In the end, I thought I’ll just create some gel prints first, and see where it takes me. I ended up going with the flow, and this is what came out of it –

I already this teal-hued scrap page from my earlier gel printing attempts. I made gel prints along the left and top edges, and at the bottom-left edge. I then added some strokes of pink paint over it. The background appeared too heavy for the poppies, so I added a thin layer of white over it. The design looked good by itself, but the more I worked with it, the more I felt like poppies wouldn’t fit in well with it. Time for me to abandon my plans. 🙂

So I used the circles from the picture as inspiration, and picked up a Spirograph to make a design that would be the base of a mandala-like doodle on one side. As I doodled, I found that the doodling was overpowering the gel-print background, so I started working on the background too, bringing in elements that stuck with me from the inspiration picture. I probably could continue doodling and keep adding more, but I felt this was a point where I could stop so I can still see something of the gel print background.

I found that I like the diagonal placement of the finished content better, so that’s how I’ll store the page. And I’ll incorporate poppies in an art journal page someday. I didn’t watch a bunch of poppy-painting videos on youtube just to drop the idea. 🙂

As for my sister’s project for the challenge – check out her magnificent pen holder! I’d love to have it on my table, actually, but she’s already called dibs on it, so I guess she’ll have to make one for me someday…

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Green, Stripes, Polka Dots | Inspiration Station

Continuing the theme-inspired creativity challenges that my sister and I throw at each other, our Inspiration Station, it was my turn to think of a theme. One day, looking at my sister stand near the curtains asking if I’d come up with a theme yet, I rattled off the three things that came to my mind from what I was seeing – Green, Stripes, and Polka Dots. That’s one way to figure out a theme, right? 😉

Actually, it might be a great way to come up with a challenging theme, since it’s completely random. Neither of us was getting any ideas right off the bat this time. (Hehe…) Eventually, after a long time trying to visualize the general design of what I wanted to create, I took some gel prints on pages from an old manual, using a 15cm (6″) square gel plate.

1.

Yellow-green polka dots, white stripes

This was actually a later attempt. I needed to use the negative from this polka dot print on another print, but then I liked the polka dots here and decided to print white stripes over it. (The white paint is drying, and I want to use it as much as possible before I bin it.)

I struggled with the text here, since no color would show on this print. I’d have really liked green, glowing text, but in the end, I had to write in gold for some visibility at an angle, at least. Fine, I’ll take it!

2.

Dark and light green polka dots, pink stripes

This was my first print, where I wanted to see if green and pink would work together. They don’t look bad at all! I used two stencils of different polka dot sizes for this.

The text here was a bit difficult too. I thought shocking pink and purple would be pretty visible, and it is, but not as much as I’d hoped for. It’s still an improvement from the earlier one, I suppose. I added some silver lining to the text, and I’m happy with this effect.

The print looks kinda vintage, doesn’t it?

3.

Green and yellow-green polka dots, dark green stripes

This was mostly from negatives of the other prints. It’s a bit tricky to get the negatives to work, since for the positives, you start with light background and work your way to the dark foreground. For the negatives, depending on the amount of negative space in your stencils, the darker negatives could overwhelm the earlier lighter ones. This time, it turned out well since I finished with a lighter negative.

The text was a breeze with this print – the white worked perfectly. I should try some stamping next time.

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I’m happy with all of the prints – they turned out truer to my vision than any of my earlier gel-printing attempts did.

Sis’s card is very different from my prints. It has clean separation of the stripes and polka dots (I love that polka glam!) and she’s represented green by some greenery, which I think is awesome.

Jewelry/Trinket Box | Inspiration Station

It might seem like my sister and I have forgotten about our Inspiration Station challenges, but that’s definitely not the case. It’s only that March got a bit lighter on the crafty side (because life!) and I just couldn’t work on any challenges. Not to fret, we’ve both managed to finish our respective artistic projects now. Here’s the inspiration that my sister chose –

Inspiration Station – Feb inspiration – Modern, eco-friendly greeting cards from Seedlings (with actual seeds embedded!), mentioned on Paper Crave

I’ve wanted to make a trinket box for my mom for a while, and I decided to do that for this Inspiration Station. My original idea was to use polymer clay and make a round, hinged box, the idea then turned into a square box, then became a gel-print based box, and finally, in its completed form, it’s a cardboard box with polymer clay embellishments. Talk about twists and turns! 🙂

This project was split over many, many days – even put back into a drawer since I wasn’t working on it – and I’m glad it came together well in the end. Due to so many changes to the project’s design, I eventually just used the colors from the inspiration, though I’d picked more elements earlier.

I started this project with thick cardboard from packaging material, making a box and a lid from it. On the inside of both, I glued some floral gel prints that I pulled using texture plates on a gel plate – I never thought texture plates would work so well with monoprinting! I had to dilute the paint a lot, though – it almost looks like a watercolor.

From our acrylics stash, I picked blue, green and a bit of black, and painted the outside of the lid and the box.

For the embellishments, I picked various molds whose designs would work for the rococo / ornamental theme I had in mind, and used scrap polymer clay to make a number of pieces. I used 3D matte gel to stick these pieces on the walls of the box and of the lid, and to the top of the lid. For some added interest, I adhered sand over some of the still-blank areas using soft matte gel. I applied more blue / green / black paint over these for added depth.

I brushed metallic coral acrylics and then applied brass / vintage gold wax onto the relief. I intended to finish the piece(s) by applying soft gloss gel, but the gel remained tacky upon drying. So I applied clear gesso over it – it seemed to fare better than soft matte gel – and though I gained a better surface to the touch, I lost all the sheen. 🙂 I brushed more wax on the pieces, but let’s face it, it’s never the same. However, I don’t have any regrets about any of the choices I made, and that’s saying something. 😉

My mom loves her new jewelry / trinket box, and so does my sister. Now that’s what I call a satisfying ending to a project!

Speaking of my sister, you’ll want to check out the oh-so-colorful underwater scene in her card. I just love, love, love the fishies, and the background is absolutely fantastic! She nailed the theme.

Inspiration Station: Art Journal Page

My sister and I have started a theme-inspired creativity session between us this year – our ‘Inspiration Station’ – one of us picks a theme of the month, and each of us makes something inspired by the theme in any media we fancy. Last month, it was my turn to pick, and I had just seen some incredible handmade bowls featuring electroformed crystals by Sabri Ben-Achour on Colossal – so I chose this as our inspiration.

Inspiration Station: Jan inspiration – Ceramic+Crystal Bowls by Sabri Ben-Achour, showcased at Colossal

My creative session included a little bit of salt painting with watercolors, a little bit of gel printing, and a little bit of doodling. I started out with the salt painting first, and then added the gel printing when I felt it would complement it. I’ve finally collected my random doodles and gel printed sheets into an art journal, and I’d thought I’d use this as a cover page. When I was done, I didn’t feel it turned out cover-worthy, and it has now joined the other pages in the journal.

The salt painting: I painted the top left half of the sheet in two shades of blue watercolors, and while the paint was drying, I sprinkled table salt at various spots. Once dry, I gently brushed away the salt, leaving beautiful patterns that remind me of the crystals in the inspiration.

The gel printing: This involved multiple prints. First, one gel print using brown acrylics at bottom right, with crumpled plastic and a ‘Faceted’ stamp providing textures reminiscent of the crackled ceramics. (I should probably use an actual crackled finish for this, which I’ll try next time.) For the central diagonal strip, I cut out a rectangular stencil-mask pair from paper, and gel-printed white on the strip and a bit of black around it. I’d intended to hand-letter the ‘cover title’ within the strip, which was dropped later since this is not a cover, and I didn’t want to write something random.

The doodling: The white on the strip turned out very patchy (since some of our paints seem to be drying out and thickening) so I decided to doodle around the patches with a silver gel pen. Impressed, I continued to doodle with other colors at other places too. I drew sharp shapes and round ones to symbolize the harmony between crystal and ceramic in Ben-Achour’s work. To add some additional interest, I scratched around at parts of the edges with a yellow gel pen to give a greenish tinge to the blues and browns.

The details in the blue and the brown, and the oh-so-difficult-to-photograph silver!

 

I liked both the process and the results of this project much better than my attempts at plain gel printing. I think I may have found what works for me!

Sis has made a texture-filled flowery card that somehow reminds me of mini-gardens in hanging baskets and in slotted containers – do take a look!

Inspiration Station: Cosmetics Holder

My sister and I collectively work on quite a few arts and crafts, and we thought we’d try out a theme-inspired creativity session between us once in a while – our ‘Inspiration Station’ – one of us picks a theme, and each of us makes something inspired by the theme in any media we fancy. We’d like to do this every month, let’s see how it pans out.

Sis chose our very first theme last month: a mood board from Butterfly Reflections, Ink which is in turn inspired by Pinterest. I’d wanted to make a short, squat cosmetics holder for some time, to put eye/lip pencils and sticks in. The mood board was perfectly inspiring to get me started on this project!

Inspiration Station: Dec inspiration – a mood board at Butterfly Reflections, Ink.

To start with, for the squat cylindrical wall of the container, I used a thick cardboard roll left over from used-up tapes. For the base, I used two circles cut from a chipboard – a smaller one that fits within the inside of the wall, and a larger one whose size matches the outside. I adhered the circles to each other and to the wall’s base.

I then glued striped paper, which I cut from envelope covers, onto the inner and outer surfaces of the base and onto the rim. To make them fit well, I cut them larger than the required size and snipped notches at regular intervals outside the ‘borders’, which proved useful to grip adjacent surfaces as well as to ensure that there are no gaps showing in the finished product. While all this dried in the sun, I moved on to gel printing.

Inspiration Station: Cosmetics Holder

The paper for gel printing was, again, from a thread-reinforced envelope, and it provides wonderful texture, both visual and tactile, which I love in containers. I used stamps with circles and patterns for my interpretation of the shapes in the mood board. The gel printing went better than I hoped (but still not exactly like I wanted to – the blues turned out too bright, and pinks are supposed to be flowers and dandelions. 😀 ) However, I just love the outcome! I cut the paper to size and glued it to the outer and inner walls, with the thread still intact.

To set the surfaces and finish the holder, I used matte transparent gel. (Thanks, Sis, for the idea! I think you’ve finally succeeded in making gel ideas stay put in my mind, ready for access at the slightest nudge. 🙂 ) I’ve already started using the holder, and I’m delighted that it’s just the way I wanted it to be!

Sis has made a pretty card for our theme, and you’ll want to look at the cute flower motifs and the background!