Turquoise

I find myself leaning more towards to blues/greens in a lot of my work and hadn't really realized until I went back over all the ATCs I have done previously. I guess that made this trade a bit easier to do for me this month. Turquoise always makes me think of the stone and I decided that was my inspiration. I used a hand painted fabric that wasn't really working for me and used it to start. It was a vague water type painted piece which was perfect. I decided to do a flour paste resist on it to get the crackles in the rocks. Once the paste was sufficiently dry, I cracked it into big cracks and painted with a thinned out brown dye. I then let it sit until dry and picked off the flour resist. That was fun :\ After fusing the fabric to pellon backing, I free motion stitched over the crack lines in black. The pieces fell short until I found some fabric paint in two different shades of blue. I painted light blue and then the dark blue in patches to give it some more dimension. It came out much better than I had imagined! My finishing touch was to paint the edges in a silver metallic paint to give the feeling of turquoise and silver jewelry.

My son used up all my batteries so I had just enough juice to take a group shot but no closeup this time. Sorry.

Turquoise...

I have really enjoyed the colour themes that Arts In The Cards have had and will have for the 2012 season. I love turquoise which is May's colour theme. Colour here in New Zealand is pretty intense and the water depending on where you are has some amazing shades of blue, turquoise being one of them.
I have also picked up Stand Up Paddleboarding (SUP) as a sport as we are lacking a nearby ice skating rink... So this month's card is a pic of a paddle boarder in the Bay of Islands... called "Bay of Islands Blue".
I admit to having a bit of trouble trying to figure out which water to use after perusing a bunch of photos, but the trip to Urupekapeka Island won out. The photo was taken by my husband.
The card itself is turquoise batik fabric, stamped with a big eraser that I carved out (speedball ink), coloured pencils, and finished with turquoise chunks I found in the too large bead stash.
Enjoy!

Native American Influence

I've been out of commission for awhile with a health issue so this was my first trade since I could work again. Turquoise is probably my most favorite color, in all values and shades that the natural stone comes in.  It is a color that shows up in my quilts and paintings more than any other.

I have a large collection of Native American turquoise and sterling silver jewelry that I wear all the time and one piece is never enough.

I wanted these cards to mimic my favorite things and the original plan was to use silver wire and beads in them, but my hands weren't cooperating to finish them the way I wanted to. The next best thing was to find some silver reflective window film to add the silver to my pieces.

The background is some of my hand painted fabric that is quilted with gold thread. The inchie in the middle is cut from my SAQA donation quilt left over pieces.  Each one is adorned with a thin buckskin strip and tiny feather. The roundel is natural wood that I thought mimics bone beads.   Because these were quilted with poly batting, I was able to seal the edges by burning with a wood burning tool.

I hope you all like them. Oh yes, because Mathea lives in New Zealand there is one card without a feather. I would hate for it to be confiscated out of the mail!

Turquoise scarab

Turquoise Scarab

The theme for May's exchange is Turquoise

for the artsinthecards art group

here is my offering

isn't he cute?

below are some of the materials i used after bright  idea light bulb came on ,

my paper sketch, paint, brushes, threads, sharp tools.
i was given a carved bead of a scarab to make into a knotted necklace many decades ago
that was part of inspiration memory recall.

what photos do not show is the iridescent  painted over color

Three scarab beetles

Here they are in all their glory
 quilted on my favorite Bernina 830 record machine .

be well, sonja

Turquoise Water. Artic Ice.

I was excited when the theme 'turquoise' was posted and I quickly added my name to the database. Turquoise has been a favorite color of mine for as long as I can remember. When I bought my first fountain pen for myself at age 16 I filled it with Skrip Turquoise ink. I still use fountain pens and I still prefer to use turquoise colored inks.

Turquoise reminds me of crystal clear Caribbean Seas and crystal clear Arctic ice.  I thought that constructing an ATC from this color would be easy because of how much I like the color. I was wrong. Because it's such a favorite I wanted the card to be a bit special - something that honors this color and reflects both the the hot and the cold that turquoise can represent. I tried several themes without satisfaction before I decided on this approach.

I used variegated gold leaf, glitter, interference paint, alcohol inks, cheesecloth, and bits of beads and glitz. I'm happy with the way this card turned out and I hope that my love for, and joy in, this color shines through!

TURQUOISE TREE

This month's ATC challenge was  challenging for me.  I can never figure out when/where/why I'll be inspired.  It did prompt me to silk screen a bunch of fabric and go from there.  The background consists of  previously painted fabric  that I cast aside because the green splotches didn't appeal to me. But when I screened over it with turquoise paint, I really liked how it was looking.  Realizing that I  needed something other than the background, I screened branches of a tree and added little turquoise bead "flowers" .  I really need to work on my beading!

Turquoise Jewelry-Inspired ATCs

The color theme for May’s Arts in the Cards ATC exchange is turquoise—one of my favorite colors. As I got dressed the other day, I put on a favorite Native American turquoise and silver necklace & earrings set, and the inspiration hit me. I realized that the reason I love that particular set of jewelry is that it is the greenish shade of turquoise, not the more popular bluish turquoise, and I love the nuances of other color within the stones.

I had some green and turq batik fabric, and printed a white flower with an original mini thermofax screen that was made from a print of one of my hand-carved block prints. I was off to a good start, but just mounting the printed fabric on a 2.5” x 3.5” piece of cardboard seemed really boring, so I began to slice and dice and add other fabrics, colors and textures. I settled on using ½ to ¾ of the flower print, alongside some olive green 100% wool felt, adding some thin, soft white batting, and stitched with turq thread. Some of the ATCs have the felt down the middle, which somehow reminded me of a butterfly; some have the flower on the felt on opposite sides...each one is just a little different. It still needed a little more ‘oomph’, so I added some tiny, irregular pieces of turquoise beads for accent.

Sadly, when I stitched the fabric ATC to the cardstock backing, the fabric shifted, leaving ugly white batting and cardboard exposed. I thought about cutting it, but the ATCs would have been lopsided and small. I thought about painting the exposed white to match the card, but that would have made a wet, soggy mess. So, here’s how I fixed it: I started by covering the white with a turquoise Crayola Twistables slick stix, but that was too bright. I went over it with a spring green Prismacolor marker…that did the trick. The two colors blended together just right, and matched the batik fabric as well as the olive felt.

April Showers . . .

Well that has been what we have been hoping for this year anyway. The winter was very mild and very little snow. Spring came early with very warm temps and still no rain. We will be facing a drought this year if it keeps up. So I started my cards with the idea of a good downpour - the kind that hits your windows and just rolls down. Ironically last night as I was working on my final steps for this challenge, we had a very heavy downpour with more to come today! Yeah!

I started with a fabric piece I had done with a folding technique in blues, whites and a hint of pink. I drew in drips and drops with watercolor crayons in blues and whites and sprayed with water to blend a little. After it was dry, I had lost a bunch of details so I used fabric markers to redefine lines. Then I free motioned all round to add more dimension and details. I added some glitter using a product called Stickles in star dust color. That had to dry overnight. Final steps were to use markers to add more dimension below each of the drips in blues and some pinks. Really hard to get the shine into the photo.

Acid Rain

                                                                      Acid  Rain
     

the prompt for this month is rain.

the challenge is how to interpret

what  rain means/feels/looks like/ tastes like to you 

and then  put  it in a space of 2.5 by 3.5 inches

 ten or more times

 and send it away. i am always amazed at the variety of cards that are exchanged.

my first or second or third idea might be scrapped once at my art table. sometimes scraps become  components of the composition.  i love words and colors.

i ruminate in that part of my brain for a while.

poetry and song lyric also influence me.

photos play a part as well as a walk outside in the rain.

t took seveal pieces of fabric outside and randomly plopted, splattered, and finger placed colors.

i let the light rain delute paints for a moment.

 left to dry on a slope the fabric gave way to drop-like shapes in some areas.

.

i cut up fabric and quilted in a random ways that water might run down a windsheild or a cheek .

one of each painting turned  into atc cards.

" Rain drops keep a fallin' on my head.."

RAIN

The March ATC challenge theme, "Rain", was supposed to be about the COLOR of rain. Rain, for me, is more about emotions or moods. I grew up in a place where rain was an unpredictable factor in whether or not your birthday party, picnic, drive, walk in the park, wedding etc. would be possible. It spoiled many outdoor functions; therefore rain was a factor in my emotional state.

I chose to use a photo of a girl looking wistfully out a window and made a transfer out of it using LazerTran mounting it on a piece of an altered magazine page. The backgrounds were all from pages of magazines that I applied washes of CitraSolv, manipulating the pages until I got the effect I wanted.

I wanted to have the background misty with rain casting a gloomy mood on the card.
Now I live in No. California where it used to rain on and off for a few months in the winter, and NEVER rain in the spring and summer. You could plan an outdoor event and be 99% sure it wouldn't get rained on. My feelings about rain have changed and I really enjoy what rain we get. Lately, however, we haven't gotten enough rain to prevent semi-draught conditions.

After the Rain

My rain cards are finished before the deadline for a change! When I thought of rain, and the color(s) of rain, I immediately thought of how the colors of everything- lawn, gardens, etc. are so bright and saturated just after the rain ends and the sun comes out. Sometimes even during a rain storm the sun will peek through and even the raindrops sparkle. I decided to try to depict the bright, sparkly, saturated colors I see at those times.

I began with a photo of my favorite flowers (this time of year), Snow Glories.... I increased the saturation and contrast in the computer to make the colors brighter. I then put it in my publishing program, duplicated the photo and arranged the images so a full sheet of photo paper would be covered. I printed the result onto a soft gloss photo paper. I had just received a nice tin of Godiva chocolates wrapped in bright colored foil wrappers, and thought the colors were perfect, so a couple wrappers were cut up and glued over the photo. The photo above shows the candy wrappers added over the flower photo.

I then began playing with a new Extreme Glitter paint to add streaks and blobs of sparkly rain... The first coat didn't impress me, so I added another, then I mixed some heavy gel gloss medium into the glitter paint so it would shine more and add texture that the glitter paint alone would not do.

Once I finally got close to the effect I wanted with the gel and paint, I fused a page with 9 card backs to the back of the photo page, then cut the cards apart. They needed a bit more, so I added a confetti flower to each along with some sparkly crystals... I didn't quite get what I saw in my head, but it does give the feeling of the bright, saturated, and sparkling colors after the rain. The photo above shows 3 of the cards as they were in the full page before cutting. The photo to the left shows an individual card, and some of the glitter and gloss paint can be seen... The cards look different in person since the camera just doesn't pick up the sparkly glitter paint well.

Raindrops and April Showers

I got carried away with this month's rain theme and made two different sets. I began with rain drops (second photo) because I wanted to see what I could do with recreating motion with fabric. In an effort to get "raindrops keeping falling on my head..." out of my head, I start thinking "April showers bring May flowers. So I decided to make a second set of cards.

Most of the time I  don't enjoy making the same thing over and over again so I made my second set of ATCs where all are different and this time out of paper. Marie Johansen convinced me to purchase a Sizzix Big Shot, which reminds me of my pasta maker, because she always sends her ATCs in amazing embossed envelopes. I'm addicted! Anyway, the Big Shot embosses paper beautifully so if you look closely at my ATCs you will see that the backgrounds are embossed. I'm all about background and words! I feel most successful when I have both. These were fun to make and I hope my fellow artists enjoy them as much I as enjoyed making them.There is something about creating little works of art always makes me happy and this group provides me with the incentive to stretch artistically. Thank you!

Its Raining In Whangarei...

Well, this month's challenge is Rain... We certainly get enough of that up here in Northland, New Zealand.
Since moving here, I have noticed the rain is different from the rain we used to get in Maine. I always felt the rain was grey in Maine. It is grey here at least it is today. It is raining with tropical strength and we have total cloud cover making it a silvery grey. But on days where the sun is shining and we have the random cloudburst it is a weird blueish colour. And when I look out at that point and time where night has just fallen, I think it looks dark blue.
So these are my colors that I opted to use. My cards are called "Rain With A Spot Of Sun". I envisioned a rainy evening background using a bit of darkish blue watery looking batik, quilted a rain drop pattern into it and then embellished. I used Shisha mirrors and orange crewel wool for the spot of sun. For the drops, I found some really pretty beads while unpacking the container from the states... The three shades of rain all encompassed in beads.
Have fun,
mathea