Hello all hope you are all happy and healthy and thanks for dropping by. I am sharing a canvas board today on the Shimmerz Blog.
Here is a little corner of it to hopefully tempt you to have a look at the full project.
Meanwhile, thanks so much for dropping by here and look after yourselves!

Welcome to my blog everyone and thank you for taking the time to come by. I hope July is going well for you....
I am going to share a little portrait with you that went through a few transformations along the way:
It was done as part of my Children of the Wild class with Kate Thomson and is based on the first full scale painting she guided us to do. The title of the class relates to the fact that all the paintings are based on children and their connection to animals, and this particular painting was based on a story around a girl with a birds nest on her head.
Here is the first stage, including the nest, the whole thing was taken from Kate's example.
Here is a close up of the nest, I left it quite loose and scribbly as I thought I would paint over it eventually anyway.:

This is Kate's painting that mine was based on, you can see I took a rather different interpretation, though I applied many of the same techniques.
Kate's picture is is on her Pinterest, so as it is public anyway, I think I can show it here too.

Anyway, I love Kate's original but as I am not really into the whole children with animals growing out of them thing, I decided to paint and draw over the bird's nest and add some further background elements, stamping and a sentiment,  to my version, so that is how I landed up here:

Hello all and welcome, specially also to new followers, thank you for coming along on my arty journey!

I am on a mission to use up some of my huge collection of papers, and so I have now finished the second little mini book I have been working on this month.

I have shared in detail in earlier posts how to put minis like these together and also how I go about altering the papers used, if you are interested, you can find descriptions here, here and for the construction of the little book here.

Hello all and happy July to you all. As you read this I am on my way to Australia to visit my grand children, so I'm afraid my blog will go very quiet over the next weeks. I'll be there until the end of August. But there will be a few sneak peeks every now and then, and I am hoping I will also find the time to show you some further work in my sketch book that will come along with me.

For today just a little preview:
The rest can of course be seen over on the Shimmerz blog.

Thanks for coming by and as I set off to the Australian winter, I wish all my friends in the Northern Hemisphere a happy Summer with hopefully plenty of sunshine and creative time!

Happy July and welcome! The first of the month means a new challenge over on the Mixed Media Monthly challenge blog and this month our theme is "Reach for the Stars". I altered a file folder to keep all my travel documents safe.
We have an amazing sponsor this month, who will also do a guest design post. It's no other than the wonderful Seth Apter!!! Here is our graphic for the month, if you want to play in our challenge to be in with a chance to win one of his amazing stamp sets, don't forget to add this graphic to your post!


My project is a full size file folder and I started by cutting a bit of card slightly smaller than the folder and then adding some scrapbook paper as my first layer.
Next I gave it a thin coat of gesso and then added various elements such as lace, strips of fabric and tape to add some texture. I also did some stenciling, using a variety of texture pastes.
The only Seth Apter products I own are two of his stencils and I used elements from them both for my background.
Time to add some colour, - I used a mix of sprays, inks, Distress Crayons and Gelato, but decided to keep my folder in monochromes. Below a few close ups:
The next and final step was to add some embellishments:
A large stamped and embossed butterfly adhered over a clock die. Both are by Tim Holtz.