Week 18: Triple Flower Mother's Day Card

Mother's Day is coming up, and you've got to give Mom a card. Will it be a store-bought Mother's Day card with sentiments written by someone else, or will it be a card handmade with love for the mothers and grandmothers and women in our lives who have mentored and loved us? Well duh. Obviously, we'll go with option #2.

My mother loves gardening, so this card is floral feast, with three kinds of flowers: a real, pressed flower, an image transfer flower image, and a "mom" decal on floral paper. Yum. Let's get started.

Three kinds of flowers on this mom's day card

What you need
For the pressed flowers:

• flower press or big, heavy book
• fresh flowers, preferably ones with few petals

For the image transfer:

• magazine images
• soft gloss gel (Liquitex)
• paintbrush
• small tray (a toaster oven tray works well)

For the card:

• blank card and envelope
• pigment ink (Palette)
• scissors and decorative scissors
• craft glue
• collage glue (Mod Podge)
• German foil trim (can be found online at 32 Degrees North)
• double-sided foam tape
• rubber stamp or sticker with a Mother's Day theme ("mom" or the like)

Some of the things you need, clockwise from left: craft glue, Mod Podge, scissors, craft scissors, blank card, German foil trim, flower press, pigment ink, stickers, double-sided foam tape

Step 1: Pressed flowers
Gather some flowers, and using a flower press, press the flowers between the leaves. Or, if you don't have a flower press, put them between the pages of a big, heavy book. Many-petaled flowers, such as roses, don't press as easily as small flowers such as pansies. This card uses a Lenten rose (hellebore).

After a few days, check your flowers. They should be pressed flat and dry to the touch before you use them.


Step 2: Image transfer
First we'll take a printed image and spiff it up so that it's card-worthy. We could just glue a cut-out magazine picture straight onto the card, but that's kind of tacky looking: it has that thin glossy magazine paper look, and there's other stuff on the back side of the image. We'll take the image and transfer it onto a hardened gel "skin" that we can then glue on to our card.

Brush a coat of gel over your images and let them dry. I'm doing a batch here, to use in other projects. Then brush on four more coats, letting each coat dry between applications. Each coat dries quickly - in about fifteen minutes.

When the last coat of gel is dry, put your image paper-side down into a tray filled with water. Let it soak for a minute or so, or until the paper is saturated.

Take out the image, turn it over, and start rubbing the paper away with your fingers. Presto! You can see the picture from the other side start to show through. Keep rubbing until you've removed all the paper. You can get any stray bits with a Magic Eraser.

Use decorative scissors to trim a pretty border around your image.

Step 3: Putting it all together

With our pressed flowers and image transfer ready to go, let's put all the pieces together and add some finishing touches.

Start by inking the borders of your card, leaving the middle clear. The image transfer becomes transparent, so if you have a dark-colored background, when you glue down the image, it'll look murky.

Add a little dimensional embellishment by cutting a small piece of floral paper and sticking a clear "Mom" sticker on it.

Glue the image transfer down with craft glue, and carefully glue the flower with collage glue (you can see the wet glue in this photo). Then take the little "Mom" embellishment and attach it with double-sided foam tape so that it sticks up a little.

The card didn't look quite done, so I added some blue German foil trim under the "Mom" and along the bottom of the card. Adding a little shiny trim really makes a difference. I also used a metallic pen to color the edges of the image transfer, adding some sparkle.

Happy Mother's Day, and happy card-making!

Week 11: Sea Joy

When it comes to art, sometimes it helps to just stop thinking rationally at all, which is how I came up with the idea of a huge seashell with a girl on top of it. This isn't a project to imitate step-by-step - you'll want to come up with your own irrational art idea - but the various mixed media techniques we'll explore in this project can help you get there.

What You Need
For the painting and background:

• poseable figure from Week 9
• gessobord (Ampersand Art; available from Blick Art Materials)
• acrylic paints, brushes, and palette

For the image transfer:

• gampi paper (available from FineArtStore or Flax in the San Francisco Bay area)
• workable fixative (Krylon)
• gloss polymer medium (Golden)

For the mixed media elements:

• light modeling paste (Liquitex)
• small unfinished wooden boxes (available at craft stores)
• gesso
• craft glue (Mod Podge or Aleene's Tacky Glue)
• embellishments: rocks, seashells, yarn
• pigment powder (Perfect Pearls)

Some of the materials needed, clockwise from left: polymer medium, gesso, workable fixative, light modeling paste, pigment powder

Working with smooth gessobord, we'll create a painting and collage that melds several mixed media techniques. We'll transfer an image using gampi paper, add texture to the smooth board with modeling paste, and add dimensionality with sea-themed objects inside small boxes.

Start by gathering the items you'll be using, and placing them on the board in roughly the position you want. Here, I have a paper poseable figure and a smaller printed version of the nautilus shell.

Find and place your objects for a rough composition

Next, we'll work with a new image transfer technique: transfer using gampi paper, which is a very lightweight paper that seems to melt right onto the surface you adhere it to. This technique creates a perfect inkjet image transfer; I learned this from Darlene McElvoy and Sandra Wilson's Image Transfer Workshop book.

Cut your gampi paper to slightly smaller than the size of a sheet of printer paper and scotch-tape it to the edges. I printed out half the seashell on one page and half on the other so that the image would be larger.

Spray the image with a coat of workable fixative, which allows you to then work with it, paint over it, and protect it. I'm chemically sensitive, so I use a heavy-duty face mask and spray it either in the garage or outdoors. Let the image dry and the fumes disperse.

Image printed on two sheets of gampi paper

The nice thing about painting on smooth board is that you can add your own texture using modeling paste, rather than being limited to the texture of canvas. I wanted the seashell to pop out of the background, so I applied a few coats of modeling paste in the shape of the seashell, letting each coat dry overnight before applying the next coat.

Adding texture with modeling paste, using a palette knife

Next, rough in the background colors using acrylic paints. I started with light watery washes of transparent colors for the ocean and sky, and then built them up in several different sessions, adding more color and texture. Once the background was painted, I cut the seashell image out and affixed it to the seashell-shaped area of modeling paste with polymer medium, which is a very thin acrylic medium. The paper is so thin that any color added to the background will show through, so I kept the modeling paste background white.

Starting to add in the ocean and sky

Here's a "first draft" of the painting. The sky ended up being too purple, which clashed with the colors of the poseable figure.

Once the sky and ocean were painted, I added texture to the waves with modeling paste and, using tape, temporarily placed the figure and boxes to check the placement.

When I was happy with the placement of the boxes, I painted them with gesso to prime them, let them dry, then glued them to the board with Mod Podge collage glue.

Painting the boxes with gesso

To add more interest to the composition, I added diagonal lines for the waves and the sandbar. After posing the figure on the shell and affixing her with earthquake putty, some multicolored slubbed yarn became her hair. And inside the boxes you'll find a fossil ammonite and a sparkly rock, purchased several years ago from Jackalope in Santa Fe.

Almost finished . . .

The painting needed a little something extra to add interest to the water and sky. Mixing pigment powder with water and brushing it on in spots on the sky, sea, and sandbar added some shine and echoed the sparkles in the rock. The one thing left to do is varnish the painting.

The final painting

I wanted to create something that made me smile; something I'd enjoy looking at. Something you've just gotta do something a little crazy.

Week 2: Ironic Kindle Cover

Electronics accessories tend to come in one-look-fits-all. Take this black Kindle cover. It's perfectly serviceable, but it's not me. Let's personalize our boring black stuff this week by adding some quirkiness back in. I'm going ironic here by working with a typewriter motif -- you know, the way books used to be written.

start . . .

to finish

What You Need

• Electronic case of your choice. The cover used here is CrazyOnDigital's leather Kindle case.
• Laser-printed, magazine, or scrapbook paper. I used graphic45's Communique Collection: Typography.
• acrylic soft gloss gel (Liquitex)
• freezer paper
• small tray
• Aleene's Tacky Glue

optional:

• Felt shapes or other embellishments. I used Fancy Pants Designs Harvest felt shapes.
• Dresden trim (vintage-ornaments.com)

At first glance, a quick and easy way to add style would be to simply glue an image of your choosing onto your background. But, because these cases get a lot of wear and tear, we need to work with durable materials that will hold up when shoved into backpacks, dampened, and squashed. We're going to create an image-transfer gel decal that will not only "melt" visually into the cover, it will also be archival because the paper is removed -- only the image remains.

To get started, cut out an image of your choice. For this technique, you need to use a laser-printed image, catalog/magazine page, or scrapbook paper. Ink-jet printouts don't work because we're going to use water to remove the paper, and ink-jet inks will run all over the place -- they're water-soluble.

Lay down some freezer paper as a non-stick surface to work on (you can find it in the grocery store; it makes a great crafting surface). Brush a thin coat of gloss gel on top of your image and let it dry, which takes about 20 minutes. Then, brush on three or four more coats of gel, letting each coat dry before brushing on the next. This sounds tedious, but it just takes a few seconds to paint the gel on each time - do it when you've got a few seconds of free time here and there over the course of an afternoon.

When your final coat of gel is dry, now comes the fun part. Pour some water in your tray (I use the tray that came with my toaster oven) and dunk your image under the water. Let the water soak in for about half a minute, then pull the image out, turn it over, and rub off the paper. Take it slow, rubbing off the layers of paper gently enough that you don't pull too hard on the gel skin on top of the image.

Gel decal after rubbing the paper off the back

The paper will all fall away with continued rubbing; you can use one of those Mr. Clean Magic Erasers to rub off the last bits. You'll see that the ink sticks to the decal, even when the paper is removed. Un-inked (white) surfaces of the paper will render transparent on the decal. Because I'm gluing a dark image onto a dark surface, I left a bit of paper on the back of the decal so that there would be some contrast between the dark image and the dark case.

I glued the image to the cover with the tacky glue, and for some more interest, I kept up with the typewriter motif by stamping a letter onto a felt shape and using that as a "button" on the flap. I added in other felt shapes as embellishments. The felt shapes are thick and sturdy, so they should hold up to repeated use.

almost done . . . but it wasn't quite right yet

I thought I was done at this point, but the cover didn't look quite right. Something was missing here to tie the look together. Dresden trim (also known as German scrap) is a shiny foil trim that works perfectly as a finishing touch. Unlike the rest of this cover, the trim may not hold up over time, as it's paper-based. But it did the trick to finish the look.

And begone, pedestrian Kindle cover!

Gotchas
I brushed only three coats of gel over my image, so the decal was on the thin side when I removed the paper, resulting in some tearing. Take the time to brush on four or five coats so your decal is thick enough to work with easily.

It took a few iterations to finish the cover. Until I added the trim, it didn't have a cohesive look. Sometimes you can be done "enough" to be satisfied, but still search for that perfect element to add in later. When you've reached a stopping point with any piece of art, use it, enjoy it, but leave room for future inspiration to strike.