#TBT post - More 2 Love

Hello there! I'm starting a new series in my blog called "#TBT post". I was talking to some friends about blogging and what one of them was saying was that bloggers don't use enough the material they already have - that is the old post. 

So as I've noticed some new readers to my blog (welcome!), I thought to share every Thursday a post I've actually done earlier. I show the project, share why I want to show it again and probably will add some info from the original post as well. I'm trying this out at first so let's see how it goes.

For the first #TBT post I chose this layout I've did for Mixed Media Place. Here's the link to the original post, blogged January last year (link).

The page was created for a discount post - all the products from category "Pens and Pencils" were -10%. I used a pencil in a number of ways in the page. That's also the reason why I chose to re-blog this. As it's a humble, inexpensive tool, but there's so much you can do with just a single pencil. You can draw, trace, color, make title and much more. I tend to use several mediums in my pages, but it's sometimes fun to limit your choices and experiment with a fewer tools. You don't have to have a big arsenal of mediums to make fun layouts.

Underneath is some text taken from the original post - a tiny bit of info about the pencil itself and also some words about the ways I used pencil in the piece.

The pen is mightier than the sword! This awesome craft tool dates back to the 16th century England and has been used ever since. The first pencils were just chunks of graphite but later a way of mixing clay and graphite was invented to produce the core of modern pencil. This also made it possible to make softer and harder pencils, just by changing the ratio of the two ingredients in the core. You can also change the darkness of the markings by the amount of pressure you are using - they can vary from light touches to pitch black especially with a soft pencil. 

There's a number of ways using a pencil. You can doodle with it, draw and write, of course. You can sketch, trace a stencil and color. What you can also do is use it for frottage technique - rub a pattern of an embossing folder for example like I did in my page. Just place something with a raised pattern underneath your paper and rub the surface of the paper with a pencil or equivalent and the pattern will appear. You can also find the tracing, doodling and coloring in my page. Did you also notice the way I added the title? The other part is written with a pencil and then cut off and the other is written straight to the page itself. 

I find doodling on a layout very soothing and also an important part of my process. I usually make doodled rings around the vocal point and then finish the page with smaller doodlings like hearts, stars or just little circles. A pencil is one of my favorite crafty tools and if you haven't tried one for a while, now's a great time to start! 

Thank you for stopping by today! Hope you are having a wonderful day!

Materials from Mixed Media Place: 

             

Materials: Tattered Angels, 7 Dots Studio, Prima Marketing, Canvas Corp, Ranger, 3rd Eye, Teippitarha

Tea stories - Mixed Media Place

Sunny Sunday! Like I mentioned in my post yesterday, the mid of the month means new challenges for you! Yesterday I shared my take on the 7 Dots Studio one and today it's Mixed Media Place's turn! The topic is "coffee". More inspiration from the team can be found in the challenge post here (link) as well as the linky tool to join in!

I don’t drink coffee at all – I tried it in polytechnic but I never got the hang of it. It smells really nice, but I don’t like the taste. So I took the liberty to change the “coffee” part into “tea”. Now there’s a drink that I love! I guess you could say that I used coffee as my jumping off point! 

I’m taking this year long workshop called “Wanderlust” and one of the first videos was from Kate Crane and showed an accordion styled album. Inspired by the form I created this, a mini mini album all dedicated to tea!

The covers are made from patterned paper but the inside is watercolor paper. And what would be a tea mini without tea? The stains and markings inside are made with Distress Ink but also with tea!

Materials from Mixed Media Place:

    

 

Materials: 7 Dots Studio, Prima Marketing, Ranger, Sharpie, Sodalicious, Design Memory Craft

He and she - Mixed Media Place

It seems that turn of the year makes me want to explore and play. It’s not that often I take out my art journal and do a page there but lately I’ve been using it more and more. For example, this spread started as a playground for watercolors, acrylics and inks and ended up looking like this in the end!

The project is done for Mixed Media Place and you can see the original post here (link) in Mixed Media Place's blog!

What I did first was to add watercolors to the spread that already had touches of acrylics on it. I used a big brush and covered most of the white pretty quickly. On top I then started to layer stamping and inks through a stencil. The whole spread was going too green for my taste so I grabbed the oil pastels and added some turquoise touches here and there to balance the things out. You see, the acrylic spots already in there were turquoise and green so I needed some more of the other color, too.

When I had the background done I started to think what to put on top. As I’m always fascinated of old photos the Ephemera pack was a great inspiration and I chose two photos and made a story with them. Before adding the layered papers to the spread I noticed that the color scheme of the background was way too bright for the vintage photos. But not to worry, tea to the rescue! I mixed tea, watercolor and Soft Matte Gel together into a glaze kind of thing and painted the whole background with it. While drying with the heat tool some lovely streaks appeared when the glaze started to pool. 

After getting “him and her” in place I added a couple of embellishments and wrote the story with a Sharpie. I deliberately used rounded handwriting and wrote the lines on top of each other that the words are not readable but form a design element.

The end result is not something I usually do, but boy it was fun to play! Do you ever just start a project without knowing what's it going to be in the end?

Thank you for stopping by today!

Materials from Mixed Media Place:

    

 

 

Materials: Prima Marketing, Ranger, 7 Dots Studio, Sharpie, The Crafter's Workshop, Talens