One more hand and more...

I have to admit, I love making art hands. I am so glad I saw the art hand swap over on Atcs for all, and that I got accepted into it. The swap was already pretty much full and luckily I got in. Well, you can see the hands I made for the swap in my post from the 28th of March, and then I made more hands in my last post. I have one more finished and the person it was intended for has received it so now I can post it.

I made another Autumn hand for a fabulous trading friend of mine, her art is so wonderful, it took me several weeks to even dare to ask her for a trade. When she accepted I really gave it more than my all to live up to her talent and she assured me by now She was over the moon with what I sent her.However, trading with her has really influenced the way I draw and even the point at which I regard a card as finished and so I wanted to surprise her with a little something.

I tried to make it look as if the tree was coming out of the Cornucopia as well, cause that is where trees come from, isn't it ? ;-)

And this is the back. If you look closely you can probably make out who I made it for.

I could not help it, when I placed it in the large padded envelope I noticed all the arting space on it, and even though it is a yellow envelope, space for art IS space for art...

Of course that is not all I made recently. I also made an art envelope for a partner and I was in a weird mood, so I had my way with a classic painting.

I wrote the adress on the waves on her right hand side. And the back shows it is not really a calm day.

Some more hands

I absolutely loved loved loved making the first set of arted up hads from the last post and so of course I made some more. You gals that have jumped over here from EAU have probably already seen them as I uploaded them into my atcsforall gallery, too. I think I really have to stop doing that to keep it more interesting for everybody that reads this and already had a look in that gallery.

And to everybody else: EAU means Envie Addicts Unite and it is an Envie "swap club" where we swap our arted up envies and send them through the postal system so they get the stamps and 'abuse' that only the postal services can provide (only kidding you postal folks out there).

Anyway, here are some more hands, this time I used my twin kids hands, they are only 2 1/2 years old, so I made sure their fingers were together for the template to provide me with more drawing area.I will start with my sons hands.

He likes the moon very much...

And he loves elephants even more...

And now my little daughters hands, she does have a prickly personality...

Yet there is so much time for her to grow...

I think next time I will be posting about my older boys hands, I have started them already and maybe I will do mine and the hubster, too. 

Art hands

It has been a month already (!) since my last post here, so another blog entry is waaay overdue at this stage! The question is only, what do I start with? I have done lots and lots of art, again most is for swaps and I do not want my partners to see what I did ahead of time. 

So I am going to show you some arted up hand outlines I made for a swap, but I already showed them  to the gals taking part in the swap so I am not spoiling anybodys surprise.

The guideline was to use your own hand as template, the fingers could be open or closed, and then art it up. We were asked to please finish it nicely so I painted some acrylic paints in gold shades and silver on the edges, using a different shade for each hand.

I had not done any Trees of Life in quite a while so I started with one and it became a whole year around series, starting with 

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

I used my trusted inktense pencils for most of the artwork, the trees are coloured with Spectrum Noir pencils as they offer more accuracy with the shading. I also used a glitter gel pen for the pumpkin and I added some diluted iridescent medium to the winter hand to make the snow, moon and snowman shimmer and I used some undiluted iridescent medium to make the snowflakes. The winter hand is the only hand that does not have gold on the edge but silver (more wintery).

I love arting up hands and so far I kept going and made some more, using my own and some of my kids hands. But that is material for another blog entry...

Weird Sun

Todays post is going to be short and painless. Remember I was saying I wanted to use one of my polymer clay faces to make a weird looking sun? Well, here goes...

Valentines 2016

Today I want to share with you all the making of a lot (!) of Valentines I have sent to lots of different people this year. I should explain to the uninitiated that I am not just sending Valentines cards and such to random people, all the recipients are part of an art trading community based in America, so most of the mail went there. We could sign up for sending the Valentines and instead of being assigned a partner we were to send a Valentine to each person that had signed up for it. I admit that a lot more people signed up than I had anticipated and I was very glad I had started work on these in late January. 

If you have not yet got your Valentine, the following could ruin the surprise for you and it is entirely up to you to keep reading!!!

Ok, I did want to make different cards for all but I knew I would probably run into time trouble along the way and so I decided to compromise. I took my chalk pastels (or soft pastels) and drew hearts in different colours all over several sheets of paper. And then I chose a different colour for each paper for the background and cut all into four single cards each.

I then sealed the individual cards with a spray sealer ( yes, I could have done that before I cut them but I had just bought a paper cutter and went a bit mad...), wrapped in individual plastic baggies and then I had to get out my good old sewing machine for these...

And this is how I mailed them, the pic was taken before I had to put a huge green customs sticker on each...

So far I have received two of the beauties that are (hopefully) headed my way, no luck in the mailbox today, though. Ah, nothing beats getting reaquainted with anticipation!

Here be Dragons

I really am on a Polymer Clay roll these days, I simply can't stop myself from thinking and making lots of polymer clay stuff. My recent "thing" is making faces with semi translucent beige Sculpey clay, I am hoping to be happy anough with the faces I make myself to make moulds out of them and then reproduce them for tree people, suns, moons and what have you. Basically anything you can possobly put a face on. 

Here are some examples of my weird faces...

They all turn out unique, but I have yet to manage one that looks kind of friendly and peaceful. Although... maybe a weird looking sun might be good, too? I think I have to give that one a try soon.

But from the faces I went on to something more fantasy inspired: Dragons. We all love Dragons, don't we? I do, and all of them, the scary western dragons and the benevolent asian dragons. They are all beautiful. So I had a look on good old YouTube and I stumbled across "Velvetorium", an extremely talented lady that make tutorial videos for making polymer clay journal covers, pendants, bracelets and more. Here you can find a link to one of her tutorials (my favourite) 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ImXEj6Q6mjc 

and you can probably see where my inspiration came from. I hope I have enough variation in my Dragon so it is not a copy...

I used Premo! polymer clay (my local art & hobby shop is starting to stock it now) and I found it was much better to handle than the Sculpey III I was using so far. It is slower to condition but because it is not overly soft it does not show fingerprints as much. And the ones you do see are obviously part of the design ;-) 

I used Premo! Peacock Pearl for the whole Dragon, with some white for the shaded wings. I think the technique has a name but I don't know it so Here is what I did to get the shading for the wings.

Another polymer clay artist that has a great influence on what and how I do it has been Christi Friesen, I used some of her leaf techniques for the flowers and in the next picture I will show you I used her leaf technique and also made a leaf cane from one of her tutorials but with my own colours.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hdo6Hl-5pU

This particular Dragon was made with Sculpey III. 

Just before baking the Dragons I went at them with a fine brush and eyeshadow (mica powder is on order) and emphasized the background textures and also details on the dragons, leaves and flowers.

And now I think I will go and try to make a funny looking sun...

Some PC work

I realise I have not posted in e few weeks, gosh, how time flies! I have been arting lots and lots, but I can not show what I did just yet, I don't want to spoil the surprise for the recipient. 

I can however show what else I have been doing, and I have been doing a lot of sculpting with polymer clay in the last few days. And also doing lots of mixed media art, and that is something new to me, I usually like to stick to my paints OR fabrics, but now I am starting to really get into using a variety of materials in my works. 

Today I am posting pictures about two small canvas I made for myself. The first uses polymer clay, seed beads, acrylic paints and mica powder. The whole thing is then painted over with a satin waterbased varnish, to protect it from dust and to help the beads stick better in the clay. Next time I will anchor them with wire...

And while I was at it I made another one, but here I used acrylic paints, pearlescent medium for the moon and stars, wire and seed beads. This time only the canvas is varnished. Then I drilled holes in the canvas and attached the tree with matching wire, secured at the back.