Creating Art & Making Mistakes

First of all, do you know how hard it is to create with a house full of kids?  This weekend has been crazy.  My son (13 years old now) brought a friend over for the weekend.  2 teenage boys and a 6-year-old girl crushing on his friend.  OY!  

I was able to complete a page Friday (it took literally all day).  I kept going back to it here and there between errands, but I refused to go to bed till it was finished.  Saturday was impossible to create, too much going on.  BUT today, I forced myself to do something and I absolutely love it and I'm glad I did it.

So here's the page I did on Friday, it's mostly just doodles and stuff.  Lots of layers of paint, pen, markers, and paper collage fodder.  Oh, and I can't forget the tape.  My mom says it looks like a Dr. Seuss illustration, with all the striped doodles going through it.  I added some Prima flowers to it, making it extremely bulky and hard to scan, hence the poor quality of the image.  Sorry!  Can I just say, I'm so in love with Sharpie paint pens and markers!  I have quite a collection started. 

{title} create art. {mixed media}

This next page is deliberately muddy.  I'm kind of blue today and that was all the more reason to get it out on a page.  If you notice the difference in the left side and the right side of the page, you'll see that one side is a little more messy than the other.  I was trying new techniques and really didn't know if they'd work, but trying them taught me how to achieve the results I wanted.  I learned from my mistakes.

I started with a round doily and sprayed a coffee colored glimmer mist to get the masked image on my page.  Next, I wanted to try image transfer.  Donna Downey makes it look fairly easy, so I thought I'd give it a go.  I ripped some pages from a Charlaine Harris book (Oh Sookie!) and applied my Basics gel medium.  So, doing that on the left (that's where I started), I learned that the gel medium smeared my ink.  Ooops.  PLUS, the Basics gel medium didn't work so well with the image transfer.  I ended up spraying water on it and rubbing the paper off.  I didn't wait long enough, so I ended up with quite a mess.  Lesson learned.  

I redid the same process on the right, but in between layers, I sprayed some fixative.  Ah...the light dawns.  The image transfer went a little better, and I was able to get more of the text to show through.  I then did a white wash over the entire thing and added some magenta dots with some bubble wrap.

To wrap up, I typed some text on regular printer paper, "You have to make mistakes to learn from them" and pulled out some old letter stickers by American Crafts.  I outlined the text strips and the letter stickers with a charcoal pencil and added a touch of water to make it softer and shadow like.  Then I went over the entire thing with Tea Stain Distress Ink by Tim Holtz.

The reason I really love this piece is that it has a double meaning for me.  I'm gong through a rough break-up right now, and this just seems apt to the situation.  Again, thank you for looking.

{title}mistakes {mixed media}