WHAT A DAY: November 21, 2014

The race began at 7:30p at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.  The event was the night before the speedway opens for cars to drive through to see the lights.  Personally, I would much rather walk the course as you get to see the lights much better. And that I did, well running in areas where the lights were sparse.  Here are some highlights:

FINISHED!!!

(apparently, the person I asked to take the photo wasn't an ideal photo taker)

 

Here is a brief video I made of the race to see the lights active.  So fun!

 

 

 

PINTEREST PROJECT: Wood Block Saying

Amy Tangerine created script stickers with Kal Barteski.  They are gorg. And someone posted a great idea on how to used them in mixed media. See below. 

I grabbed a piece of birch wood and chose my words. CHERISH THIS.

Taped the edges. And chose my spray paint. 

First gold....

Then blue...I had removed the tape because the gold got on some parts of the trim so I just sprayed it all. 

Then teal...

And you can tell by this point I wasn't spraying properly to avoid seepage under the letters or the edges being covered. 

And then I retaped and sprayed with black. The other colors were not showing the statement as bold as I'd like. 

I was not happy with the results. Soni started over with just black.  Taking my time and spraying evenly. 

And I got this. Which I still wasn't happy due to the squared edges the spray paint left. 

So finally I went back to the original and got out the sand paper. 

To my surprise. The layers below showed through. And the final result made me happy. 

It's not perfect or precise and clean as the sample photo (which is awesome) but it's my creation. And I CHERISH it. 

JOURNAL COVER: Thanksgiving 2014

After I booked my trip to Nebraska for Thanksgiving, I knew I wanted to document the days in a SMASH album. I have been doing this for the past 2 trips utilizing my Instax camera film...and I love the results....plus it gives me a simple canvas to doodle and art on throughout the trip and flights. .Just have to do a few simple prep pages to satisfy my creativity.

 

So the cover idea came from Balzer Design's blog post about foil tape art.  Instead of using cardboard cut-outs, I opted to use my handwriting and cut out foam stickers.

(I adore Jen Osborn's handwriting, so I stole some of her font style letters.)

 Then stuck them in place, and took foil tape over some images...and cheetah print duct tape over others. 

One thing I learned is going vertical with the tape makes it easier to shape around the letters and images.  The SMASH album already had an imprint on the cover so I just rubbed into the design as well.

Nervously, I painted over the entire book using white gesso and acrylic paint.  I wanted a solid base so I wouldn't worry about the paint chipping off the tape.

And then I added my color. It appeared much brighter when it was wet...then dulled quit a bit when dried.

Time to sand...also learned pieces of sand paper work better than the block sander.

Some areas I sanded down too much so it dulled the shiny tape.

So I decided to brighten areas up by highlighting with neon red and pink and adding a real leaf.

After a few days, the leaf turned a dark maroon probably due to the gell I used to adhere it, so simple solution was to doodle on the leaf. 

And that is the cover with more to come I am sure.  As I complete the album, I tend to go back and add more to the cover, but it is the startt and my favorite part. The other prep work I put into the albums is prepping pages with gesso or absorbent ground mediums so I can use watercolor crayons or markers ,pastels, etc..