Creative Squad: Good Morning Good Evening – Riikka Kovasin

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a post and video from Riikka Kovasin who is sharing an art journal page using my Row Houses foam stamp and Art Deco Empire stencil in response to our theme: Good Morning Good Evening – Are you a Morning Person or a Night Owl? Or maybe neither? Create a project inspired by your preferred time of day – when you are in good spirits, doing what you love, and enjoying life.

Dreamer and Doer Under the Stars

Hi there! It’s Riikka here today with my take on the theme “Good Morning, Good Evening”. I did an art journal page and as always, recorded a little video while making it.

I’m a would-be night owl. When I was younger and could get away with less sleep, I used to draw, sketch and get my best ideas during the nocturnal hours. But as I’m growing older, I need my eight hours and during work weeks can’t really be up too late. When I’m on vacation, though, and can self decide my daily rhythm, I tend to craft until morning hours and then sleep in. But unfortunately, in everyday life that rhythm doesn’t work. Thus the “would-be”.

I knew immediately that I wanted to depict night, but the question was how and with what. The answer came when Nat’s great new stamps arrived. I stamped each of the motifs to a cardstock to try them out (and made a Reels out of it) and then used that cardstock to create two projects. The other of those was an art journal page. I really loved how that turned out and thought to re-create it with some alterations – most of all the color scheme. The other inspiration for the page was a stunning evening scenery through our living room window one night. An inky blue sky with white smoke-like clouds and stars just emerging and underneath it the black and golden apartment buildings with some lights on. I used that image to compose my color palette and even added that airy cloud to the sky. What the scenery was missing, was the big silver moon I added to the page.

I used gel printing plate to create the colored pieces. A gradient blue for the background and a mix of two yellows for the building. As I mimicked the golden tones I saw during the evening, I needed a yellow background for my black building silhouette. That created the effect of a lit building. I colored one of the windows of the “Row Houses” with yellow to show that someone is awake. I kind of thought that would be me, crafting, when the city is otherwise asleep. The “Row Houses” was an obvious choice for the scenery as we live in an apartment building and all the other buildings around are also with several stories.

I was looking for “a night owl” text sticker to finish the page, but fortunately couldn’t find one. That forced me to think other versions, and I combined two texts to compose a story. It sounds a bit poetic – dreamer and doer under the stars. Dreamer I thought in this case to mean both actual dreaming, sleeping, but also hopes and dreams. Doer on the other hand is the crafting part. Are you also a “under the stars” style crafter or rather the opposite?