Myth and Magic at Cardz 4 Guyz

There's a super challenge this week at Cardz 4 Guyz - Myth and Magic. Think legends, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Merlin, Harry Potter,  Dragons, Sorcerers, Magic Potions or even magicians pulling rabbits from hats!

I decided to use this fantasy creature stamp - is it a dragon or a winged sea-serpent, do you think? - which is a Linda Luckin stamp from many years ago and no longer available. It's a stamp I come back to over and over again, I love the fact that it's not just magical but also slightly cute, in a monster-ish kind of way.

I stamped it on glossy card using Stazon ink and then got out my encaustic painting kit. I chose the "mystical" colours of purple, turquoise and blue to create my dragon's grotto. First I put a band of clear wax up the centre of the iron sole plate, then narrow bands of purple and turquoise each side and swept the iron up the card. Then I used the wax remaining on the card to create suction patterns around it, by gently dabbing the card against the sole of the iron and pulling it smartly away. For the lower third of the card, I added a little blue wax to the wax left on the sole plate. When I was happy with the suction pattern, I used the very edge of the iron to draw lines of blue wax up the card to create "plants".

I trimmed and mounted the image and buffed it to a shine with a soft tissue. A design like this really needs no more embellishment!

 

I would like to join in with the following challenges:

 

Alphabet Challenge - N for No Patterned Paper  

Crafty Gals Corner - Anything Goes 

Glitter and Sparkle - Happy Birthday 

Craft Your Passion - Anything Goes  

 

Now I'm going to end this with a plea for help at Challenges For Days. Challenges for days is a blog challenge listing service - I have been a member of the team for about a year, and we post daily lists of craft challenges that have been updated each day. Each member of the team looks after a particular day's list and updates the post on that day of the week.

 

Sadly one of our members is leaving the team due to family commitments and we are looking for a replacement. You would need to be able to spare around an hour a week (perhaps a little more while you learn the ropes!) and have a Blogger account. There's no reward for this, except the knowledge that you are helping all the crafters who rely on the regular lists for inspiration, and the blogs who rely on them for publicity - so there's a lot of satisfaction in doing it! And as an added bonus, you will often spot new blogs that you hadn't known about and will enjoy taking part in.

 

For further information, and how to apply, see the Help Needed  post that Zoe has added to Challenges For Days.

 

 



 

Sydney Sunset

Actually I'm not sure whether this is sunrise or sunset - apart from not being able to picture which direction I'd be facing if this was all one view, the different hemispheres and time zones throw my brain into a total funk. So maybe I should have just called this "Sydney with an orange sky" but that's not very snappy, is it?

Anyway, whichever  way I am facing, this stamp from the Tim Holtz "Cityscapes" set reminds me of a wonderful holiday some years ago which included a few days visiting friends in Sydney, who showed us all the famous sights, so I decided to use it for my entry to the current challenge at The Male Room which is Vacation/On the Beach

 

Since I attended the Make It Show in Farnborough earlier this year, I've become very keen on Encaustic Painting again  - you can read about my reintroduction to it here - it is the art of "painting" using wax melted onto the sole plate of a hot iron, and I thought this would work perfectly for this scene AND make an unusual entry for the current Inkspirational challenge, with the word prompt  Melt 

                                                  

 

I stamped the scene on to glossy card using Stazon ink, then loaded the iron sole plate with clear wax on the lower half and yellow, orange and red at random on the upper half, then swept the iron randomly across the card a couple of times. Then I cleaned the iron, added a narrow band of blue wax with a little white to the edge of the sole plate and ironed a band of blue at the bottom to represent the sea. (Note- only use white pigmented waxes in areas where you don't want stamping to show through, as it is opaque, whereas most of the coloured waxes are transparent).  

 

When the wax was cool, I polished it with a soft tissue and trimmed and mounted it to fit a DL card.

 

 

 

 

 

More encaustic painting

I've really got the encaustic art bug back now! This time I decided to try combining it with stamping.

To combine stamping with encaustic art, the stamping needs to be done first, using a Staz-On pad, so stamps that have a strong silhouette appearance are ideal. This city skyline was perfect for the job! The idea is that the stamped area resists the wax and keeps its silhouette appearance, with the wax appearing to form a background to it.

However in the years since I was doing encaustic art before (and it's longer than I thought - in the box where I store my bits for it, I found the receipt for the last waxes I bought - it's dated 1992!) I had forgotten that the white (used in the sky) and grey waxes are opaque and the stamping doesn't resist them to the same extent, so my city sky and street obscured part of the stamped image.

However with wax, all is not lost - my scraping tool, designed for making paths and spiders webs, is also good for removing unwanted wax, so I was able to scrape it away from the buildings.

All it needed was a bit of carefully chosen matting and layering to produce the finished card.

I'm sharing this with Make my Monday where the challenge is Building, Town or City.

More inspiration from the Make It show

The other week, the Make It show came to Farnborough and I spent a day there. One of the workshops I attended was an encaustic painting class. Now, in the dim and distant past, I used to do a lot of encaustic painting. my Dad and I learned together, and shared books, tips and videos, but when he passed away 15 years ago, I lost my enthusiasm for it. I still have all the kit, though, and thought that a refresher lesson might help me to get back into it again.

If you've never met encaustic art before, it involves melting hot wax onto the sole plate of an iron, and then applying the iron to glossy card in different ways to get different effects. One of the beauties of it is that you can never be exactly certain how it will turn out - you can use the colours you choose to guide your design in a certain direction, but the finished result will be different every time.

My samples from the show made three very different designs - a landscape, an underwater scene and a rough, stormy sea. I spent this morning making them into cards.

For the first one, I simply matted it with cardstock that echoed the colours of the flowers in the foreground:

The next is an underwater scene, and as well as matting it, I added a cute little die-cut whale from the X-cut set I won a couple of weeks ago at Pixie's Snippets Playground

For the third and final one, I added a die cut pirate ship from the same set, and used some wave-effect patterned paper as a background

The really satisfying thing is that all the papers and card used in them came out of my snippets box - I didn't have to cut into a single new sheet, so I feel as if I've made these cards out of nothing at all! (Well, apart from the adhesives and actual cards, that is!)

Having used so many scraps, I'm sharing this with

Pixies Snippets Playground week 167
Clear It Out Challenge - Anything Goes