Cath Sheard Art

Tag: Crusades

  • Crusade No. 41 – Grid Lock

    Most months I try to do Michelle Ward’s Crusade over at the GPP Street Team site. Crusade 41 is entitled Grid Lock – Michelle’s tips include a very cool way of marking out a grid on paper or in your journal. I decided to use this Crusade for a practical purpose. I have started dong a scrapbook of our recent trip to Dubai and Italy; I decided the album would be black and white cardstock only, with a little black and white patterned paper here and there. My favorite scrapbook shop sent me some lovely supplies but I hate cutting into “good” paper – silly I know. So, I have cut a sample of each piece of patterned paper and stuck it in the grids in my visual diary. Now the sheets are not “good” any more and I’ll get on and use them.

    If you haven’t been to Michelle’s sites before, why not pop across and have a look? And if you lurk but don’t join in, why not grab some supplies and have a try. Then have a look at all the other entries this month, they’re sure to inspire you. Don’t forget to leave a comment everywhere you visit, you’re sure to make their day 🙂

  • Crusades: braving the elements

    Today I found time to join the Crusades once again. Michelle’s last Crusade is here. The challenge involved making some paper snowflakes. We all made them at primary school so how hard could it be. In my case, quite hard as it tuned out. I seem to be snowflake-challenged. Seriously! I ended up going to a kindy page on the net and following their instructions. That’s my rather embarrassed admission for the day out of the way…

    I made 5 snowflakes, following the instructions for 6 year olds, and ironed them flat seeing I had the iron on already. I had gessoed my journal pages right at the start, as Michelle suggested.  I brushed color on let it dry a bit, misted with water and blotted to get a splotchy effect. I dry-brushed colour around and over the snowflakes, overlapping them to get partial images, and then wiped some gesso onto the flakes to mute the colours a bit. Once everything was dry I glued my flakes down on the page.

    They’re not my favorite pages ever as they stand, but I want to leave them like this so I can journal over them later. They’re a great beginning though, and that’s very cool. And, as Michelle said it would be, this Crusade was a good reminder of skills we have learnt in the past. So some on, what have you got to lose? Get cutting!

  • Crusade #35 – what’s your sign?

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    Over at Michelle’s GPP Crusades blog, this month’s challenge is to document your sign. Michelle says “The signs I’m talking about are images or things that make you think of a loved one”. My instant thought was “I can do that, possibly even without crying”. And I did. Because I needed to write so much I have created my journal page in Word and Photoshop and will be printing it out to glue into my journal as a reminder to myself.  So, come on, why not join the Crusades too, and tell us about your sign? (By the way, documenting my sign turned out to be more imporant than doing something artsy this time. I didn’t even pick up a paintbrush!)

    dad show me a sign copy

  • Come over to the dark side

    Michelle’s challenge for the Crusade’s this month was to journal on black. Excellent! I painted a couple of pages in my visual diary and then things got busy…weeks later, I finally got back into it this morning. I did two pages; one is about dragonflies, thinking about their wings and playing with iridescent colors. The other is a “proper” journal page, recording some thoughts on my life with Tony, my husband of 17 plus years.  

    tony journal page oct 09

    I enjoyed working on a black background, which I suppose should not surprise me, as I often use plain black cardstock as the background in my scrapbooks. I used acrylic paint this time but the surface is a bit too slick – I think next time I’ll use black gesso. dragonfly page

  • Crusade #33 – back to school

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    Michelle’s challenge over at the GPP Street Team this month is to learn something new, either in or out of the studio – you can read all about it here. I decided this month I would learn to let go of the results a bit more, and just enjoy the process. In the spirit of going back to school I have been reading about the creative process, about play, and about some new cutting-edge techniques – trying to make my objective an active on. Some of the books I have dipped into have included Nita Leland’s “The new creative artist“, Nancy Reyner’s “Acrylic revolution” and Lisa Cyr’s “Art revolution“.  

    Moving on from reading, I have been playing with looser backgrounds as beginnings to works, collage, enhancing digitally then printing and working further on paper. In the image shown here I photographed a chook in amongst some weeds, made a loose background with texture, collaged the photo on, added some old watercolour painting strips on top, scanned and enhanced digitally. Is it a masterpiece? Not at all. Did I let go off the results and just learn through play? Yes.

    Thanks Michelle – my “back to school” lesson was one I needed to start (re)learning. chook crop