AlteredPages Artsociates

I love the style of this old-fashioned bicycle.  It's one of the chipboard die cuts available at DIY Design Studio and it is a lot of fun to use.   My first idea was to try and distress the image with ink.  The StazOn is good for distressing chip board because it's permanent and dries quickly.  It just wasn't the look I wanted today.  So I decided to paint them instead.  Perfect for my project. I liked the gold bike so well that I decided to paint the other one, too. I added some rhinestones just to blint them up a little bit. For the gold bike, I chose the Life Time pad of Prima paper.  You've seen me use this one before.  It's one of my favorites because of the range of shades and splatters.  They are beautiful papers. I needed a piece of paper 6 x 4 1/4.  I opted to make the darkest section the body of my card and then use the part with the sentiment as a layer.   I added ...

I love this time of year!  I know for a lot of people Halloween means decorating their home inside and out, but for me it is a great time to make spooky art.  DIY Design Studio has several fun Halloween collages for your art projects. Both of my cards started out with plain card stock and a piece of punchinella.  Green ink with green paper and white ink with black paper...just to give the blank space a little texture. I used a strip of washi tape for a background element but a strip of scrapbook paper or a piece of ribbon would also be great.  I just wanted something fun behind the main collage image. I added a few highlights to the Halloween damsel with a white gel pen.  There is shading on the pumpkin eyes and noses.  And tracing around the skull and crossbones on her cloak and the grid on her dress really make them stand out.   A few Dew Drops make a nice dimensional highlight.   For the card ...

As promised, I have the flip side of my altered pocket page for Halloween.  For this side, I used all black and white collage images from The digital collages at DIYDesignStudio. In my first post for this project , I told you how I try to blend in the white edges of the paper with ink on color collages.   The rule is not as hard and fast with black and white images. Sometimes you need a fine line of paper around the image to make it stand out.  If you layer all black and grey images without the little "halo" you might not see everything.   As with the color collages, paper matters.  I used white paper for everything on this project.   I like black and white images for Halloween because they somehow just feel spookier!  Create yours with pocket pages - available here

I've been making a lot of bookmarks lately.  Every year I like to give a token gift to my co-workers for Christmas.  Last year it was plastic candy canes full of candy and this year it's going to be bookmarks. I'm making a lot of them so that each person can choose a design that they like best. All of these bookmarks came from one paper pad by Prima.  It has designs in several earthtones so they all play really well together. There are pages in this Prima Life Time paper pad that have tiny elements and they work beautifully on small size projects like bookmarks, tags and ATCs. After matching up backgrounds to color card stock, I tried out several layouts on each one until I found the looks that I liked best. The images below are in sets of two.  Each bookmark in the photo has the same background paper.  I posted them together to show the different looks you can get using the same set. Many of the images stamped here are available here ...

This week I have been playing around with color.  Fall is inching closer and Michigan will be a flood of reds and golds in a few short weeks.  I love Fall colors and that's what I've used on this canvas. I started with a layer of gesso.   Right after the layer was complete, I dipped my brick stencil into the wet gesso to leave an impression. To better show the texture of the dried gesso, I smeared on a few light spots of Gelato to highlight the ridges. The entire canvas was covered with Dixie Belle's Grunge Glaze.  Since I was going with a Fall theme I felt like the brown in the glaze would be a good fit. The glaze interacted with the Gelato and gave me some different undertones.  Gelatos are water soluable so they are activated with paint just as easily as with water. I chose a few more Gelatos that reminded me of fall and used my finger to apply them in random spots on the canvas. Now to add some fun texture!...

If you haven't yet searched for Halloween goodies at Altered Pages then please let me recommend them to you!  There are collage images of every type so whatever type of project you're making, you won't be disappointed.  Which Halloween collage did I use for this project?  All of them.  Well, it seems that way.  Let me explain. When you're making an altered pocket page project you need a lot of collages to work with.  So I printed off each of the Halloween collages that I've collected over the years and cut them apart while my husband and I watched baseball.  That way, I could work on a project, still have our time together, and because I wasn't coloring or assembling, I could put it down and pick it up with ease. When you are printing your images at home, you control the size and color.  I printed a couple different sizes for each page and I also used a couple of different color papers.  It's important to keep in mind that t...