Back from California and catching up on posts....

            Hello Friday viewers...

As you are about to see, I broke with our Artistcellars design team's theme of Black and White this week. I'll make up the B&W challenge another time! ")  
 I was in California visiting my sons and had already had this post prepared!   Now onto my weekly Friday post~times two!

 This week I needed to update our name plaque that we take with us when camping. We moved last year and I needed to replace the town and decided to add some spunk to my already painted plaque.

I painted my original plaque,in 2005-with our favorite bird- the Rose-Breast Grosbeak (female)

  For this project, I used my Mini Cubist stencil and Golden Coarse Pumice Gel. I layered the gel through the stencil onto various parts of the plaque and waited for it to dry.

When the Pumice Gel was dry I covered the areas outside of my Rose Breast (and yes,this was difficult!) with gesso- 2 layers.

 After the gesso was dry I proceeded to repaint in our name and new town-

Here I added some color to to the gel using  Luminarte Silks - Golden Monarch  and Luminere paint- Halo Pink.

As you can see, I applied it with, my favorite tool, my fingers, at first , then another coat with a dry brush.

After a few coats of the Luminarte and Luminere paints - my plaque is reborn! 

As always, thank you for joining me and I hope I have inspired you to use your stencils and or paint with your fingers! teeheehee


And now for last week's post that I missed...

Here it is...the last Friday of August already! Can you believe it?
For this week,my inspiration came from Artistcellar Design Team member, Sarah Trumpp. 
Sarah has an awesome painting series on YouTube and this one,
 24 of 50 Canvases in 2014: Torn Tissue Paper Mixed Media Speed Painting  
 was the video that sparked my muse and kicked my inspiration into gear. Thank you Sarah!

The first thing I did was coat a hardboard substrate with black gesso-

While the gesso is drying, I pull out an assortment of colored tissue papers and started stenciling Lynn Krawczyk's X's stencil from her Marked Series.

I stenciled X's over all the colored tissue papers using just Black & White acrylic paint. After that I tore the papers into strips and adhered them to the board with Golden gel medium.

 At this point I also added a few other pieces of ephemera to the substrate and waited for the gel medium to dry. The design looked a bit too bold for me,so I toned it down with some white gesso.

Next, I also used the Comma Stencil from Lynn's Marked Series - Laying the stencil down I wiped away the gesso from the Comma's to give me the negative on the substrate.

On a separate piece of Mulberry paper , I added a stamp with black ink and then colored in the stamp with watercolor markers. After tearing the edges it was glued onto the center of the piece with gel medium.

And lastly, I add a few more small pieces of ephemera and my stamped phrase-
Expand your horizons your imagination will follow
and we'll call this a wrap!



This is the reason for the late posting...
Just back from California after spending , not enough time "(
 with my two sons and daughter in law. 
 It is always so hard to leave my kids after visiting-

we had so much fun-
and as you can tell- we laughed...and laughed!! 
              I miss them so much already! "( 



Thanks so much for joining me again today!! Jackie ")