Valentines

The last couple of weeks I made valentines for family members and friends.  Below is the one I made for the Creative Every Day "love" challenge for February.

 

 

I neglected to photograph all of them. (Shame on me.)

Brown Paper Bag Backgrounds

For the monthly challenge at Oriental Stamp Art, we are to create a project using painted brown paper bags. I thought this was a terrific time to pull out some unused items and also meet the challenge over at Lets Play. AND, also the challenge at Creative Carte Blanche.

First I painted the brown bag with white gesso and for one section, I took a baby wipe and removed a lot of the gesso.  (gesso provides a great surface for other colors).  Then I pulled out my Gelatos and added three main colors and on the other section omitted the pink shade and used Lumiere Paints.  On the green section, I also used some Brushos in blue, yellow and orange.  When dry I used a stencil by Ryan Design to add the gingko leaves using a Delusions spray.  I crinkled up the paper when dry because I wanted more texture, adding silver and gold sprays by Lindy's Stamp Gang.  I turned both of these pieces into cards.

1) For the green section I tore the brown bag away from it and edged it with a brown distress ink pad, and with a sponge added some brown ink to the  high spots on the card.  Then I added a brown ribbon and the Happy Birthday Chinese chop and mounted the finished card to a light green followed by a white card.

2)  For the second card, I trimmed it and mounted it on a blue card and then white, adding a ribbon and fan element along with a Thank You in a Japanese kanji.

 

This was a really fun project and I plan to make more backgrounds for my art journal.