Bird Book Play Day

Charlotte and I had a play day yesterday. We both worked on bird books. Our inspiration was from the new Somerset Studio Gallery....Charlotte's was completely different and very lovely. I wish she'd "blog" so she could show off her work.
Mine is 5 x 7 illustration board....quite heavy. I covered the pages with different papers and dry brushed some of them. I was pretty unhappy to find when I filled the xyron with a new roll and ran two pages through before I realized it was laminating stuff!
$20 down the tubes. Shoot....the pages were weird and nothing wanted to stick, of course. No extra rolls so I just used soft gel medium to glue the paper to the rest. Then the fun part was embellishing with stamps, scrap, all kinds of birdies and eggs. I'm sort of hipped on birds....can you tell? Well, actually the gold finches in my yard have eaten the zinnias down to bare bones. They by-pass the seed and eat the flowers and leaves. We can't make them stop so I didn't put any gold finches in my book. Bah on them!

I just finished it up tonight and scanned all the pages. I should post a picture of my dining room table, too....I don't think the surface is visible at all. When it gets to that point, I can't find anything so I spend most of my time looking for things I need. I thought I'd clean it off tonight but I'm too pooped. Art is hard!
Remember, you can click on the pictures to enlarge. Better to see my mistakes...heh heh.

Just finished this little bird thing that has been calling my name. It fell off the closet shelf a couple of times in it's original state of navy blue, orange, yellow and red. It had drawers in it which had to go bye bye. This mother bird is resting up after laying 2 eggs that were big enough to do her in real good. Actually, she's thinking about a sitz bath. On the sides, there's a copy of a child's story about a robin. The photography is lousy....should have taken the picture in the morning light.

Transfers

I have been trying transfers for what seems like forever! Never had much success but I'm pretty excited about what I tried this morning. For what it's worth, here are the pictures of what happened. I belong to the Yahoo inkjet transfer group and have mostly just lurked trying to glean information. I have tried a lot of posted techniques with little or no success. Now I don't know if anyone who is good at transfers would think much of these, but I'm happy enough that I would attempt to put one over something that I previously was afraid I'd ruin. I followed Angela Silva's (Inkjet Transfer group) directions and used Office Depot High Gloss Premium Photo Paper, 9 mil thickness, heavy weight. There are 25 sheets and it was on sale a week or two ago for $9.99. Then I used Golden Soft Gel (Matte) on the substrate with my finger, just making a nice smooth layer. At first I used too much and it was obvious when I removed the photo paper that it was really oozing. When I printed the image onto the photo paper, I used the regular printing option (standard) and glossy photo paper setting. I have a Canon Pixma 6700. Funny thing is that the picture of the little boy actually was a black and white cabinet card. The black ink evidently turns blue when it hits the Soft Gel. Oh, and I tried the back of a spoon, a bone folder, the scissors handle and a brayer. Didn't seem to make much difference what I used. Why does a transfer always leave out someone's beak or nose? Hmmm?
Thanks to Angela for helping me make some fairly decent transfers!

Rust and Cwafts

What's this? Two posts in one day? I just wanted to share the beautiful rusted paper (so much prettier in real life!) that I learned to make from Val's blog at http://valsalteredheartjourney.blogspot.com/
It was just on regular copy paper but it almost has a parchment feel once it's rusted. To learn how to rust stuff, you will need go to her blog, scroll all the way down and then go to "older posts" and it's about half way down the page. I doubt if you'll get there very fast because she has the most delicious textured things to look at on the way! The rusted technique is wonderful and she even does fabrics. So here's to Val...the texture queen! Thanks for sharing your technique, Val.

Rusting aside for the moment, I wasn't going to bore you with this but I can't help myself. I watched my barely 3 yr. old granddaughter, Lauren, today and she said "Gammaw, I want make a cwaft (craft for those who don't know 3 yr. old talk), ....we made crafts for 2 hours and when she had made one for everybody in the family, including both grandmas, mom, dad, the daycare lady, and the cat, she said "I'm an ahtist, gamaw. Are you going to be an ahtist, too?" Just too much fun, these 3 year olds! If the truth were known, I would have been very sad if she hadn't wanted to be an "ahtist"!

Brian's Altered Book

Finally finished the altered book for my grandson's graduation gift. The pictures are on Picturetrail and here's the link. (Gosh, it's been so long since I posted, I can't even remember how to make a link!) http://www.picturetrail.com/gallery/view?p=999&gid=19880460&uid=8870981
He will see it Saturday night at his grad party. It's big and fat...it was a dictionary but not the one I originally intended....the ten pounder! I soon realized I couldn't deal with that one so this little less weighty one worked out fine. It took me about 2 months to complete. A description of the cover and each page is on Picturetrail.

As we have told our children many times, there are consequences for not eating your vegetables. Here is a shrine depicting what happens (eventually) when you don't eat a healthy diet. This is so NOT ME to make something like this....a far cry from vintage darlings and spring flowers and birds. Not sure what took hold of me other than I had a couple of medicine bottles that looked interesting. My friend Charlotte (who is a veritable gold mine of supplies!) came to my rescue when I said "I think I need a skeleton....where would I get one?". She (as usual) said "I have one". Not only did she have one but it fit EXACTLY inside the shrine. One leg is a itsy bitsy longer than the other (you see, other maladies occur to the human body when you don't eat your vegetables!) but he is perfectly positioned just where he needed to be. Thanks, dear Charlotte!