Creative Squad

Creative Squad: Wish You Were Here – Maura Hibbitts

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a lovely art journal spread from Maura Hibbitts using my Cape Cod, Mini Motifs, Tread, and Adirondack Chairs rubber stamps and our latest theme: Wish You Were Here – This time let’s think about those old travel postcards, or someone you are missing or haven’t seen in a while, or maybe a place that you are missing. The message is loud and clear: Wish you were here!

One of my favorite places in the world is right here at my home…I love my deck! I have a beautiful view of the Adirondack Mountains that I enjoy every day. The warm months let us move outside to enjoy relaxing in the Adirondack chairs and eating outdoors. My son Dan has the green thumb and adds his touch to the deck with a variety of plants: this year it’s a lot of rhododendrons, cacti, herbs and more. It’s the perfect place to gather, and I wish you were here with me.

I’m working in one of my art journals, and began the project by stamping a scene with black ink, onto the page using Nat’s Cape Cod, Adirondack Chairs, and Mission Motif stamps.

I also stamped some images onto Grafix Doubletack paper. I used Nat’s Tread and Mission Motif stamps. Be sure to let these dry completely.

Now comes the fun part! Color the images in the art journal and on the Grafix sheet with Woody pencils (or any water soluble pencil).

Use a water brush to spread the color from the Woody coloring. You will note later that I changed my mind on the roof color. This was easy enough to do – once the page was dry, go over the area with another color and blend again.

Cut out the second “umbrella” and cobblestones from the Grafix paper and adhere to page. Color and blend in a background with the Woody pencils and water brush. Let dry completely, then add detail with a gold pen and waterproof black pen. Add “Wish you were here” and your page is done!

I do love to travel and have many places I carry in my heart, from the ocean to the mountains, villages to cities. Each place has its own unique beauty. But, it is always good to come home and enjoy what is right here on my doorstep. I have been so grateful to have this special place in recent times, and to share it with family and friends. Where is your special place? Let us know in the comments! – Maura

Thank you Maura! We love seeing your beautiful backyard oasis and how it inspires you!

Give it a try: you can find all my Rubber Stamps in my Online Shop and here are some of the supplies Maura used:

Looking for more inspiration from the Creative Squad? Follow them on Instagram here.

Nat

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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?

Thank you for stopping by today! Have a great week!

Thank you Riikka – I love that window and thinking about who may be in there, working away under the moonlight!

Give it a try: you can find all my Foam Stamps and Stencils in my Online Shop and here are some of the supplies Riikka used:

Like what you see? Follow the Creative Squad on Instagram for weekly posts, artwork, and inspiration.

Nat

Comments (1)

  • Sue Clarke

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    Riikka, this is stunning. I love the golden colors around the buildings and the moon dust!

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Hydrant Card from my Creative Squad

A bonus project from Riikka Kovasin from my Creative Squad for you today :) I think this card is super cute with the Hydrant foam stamp as the focal point on top of Grove St (for some extra oomph) and the message “You are the best”!

Here is from Riikka:

“I’m not totally sure how a person could be the best hydrant, but I still thought that the Hydrant would make a great focal point in a card! The shape is really captivating, don’t you think? Maybe it’s more like the hydrant looks like number one? Or that it doesn’t have anything to do with the sentence! “

“Where the art journal page was layered with different mediums, this card is more straight forward. There’s only different inks used in this card. Oh, and some pencil scribbles. The background is done using Archival Inks. First I stamped the circle (another ArtFoamies, Grove Street) and then added some yellow patterns around using a stencil. The focal point, the “Hydrant”, is stamped using Distress Ink and it’s actually from a try out sheet I did after getting the stamps. You might have seen that on my Instagram Reels.”

Thank you Riikka – I think anyone would be honored to be called the best hydrant LOL

Give it a try: you can find all my Foam Stamps in my Online Shop and here are some of the supplies Riikka used:

Nat

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Design Team Talk – SYH Webinar Tomorrow Aug 27th!

Get ready for my Creative Squad on tomorrow’s Spill your heART!!!

I’ve got 4 of my Creative Squad members – past and present – ready to talk about Design Teams! Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on a Design Team? We’ll hear from 4 veterans on what it takes to join one, how to flourish, what it’s like to create “on assignment”, and what they’ve taken from the experience.

Register to Attend the LIVE Webinar on Friday, Aug 27th at 12noon ET (NYC time).

My panelists will be Robin Seiz, Riikka Kovasin, Nicole Watson, and Emilie Murphy, sharing their Design Team experiences. Also our audience will have a chance to participate in the discussion in the live chat and may ask the panelists questions live in the Q&A.

Join us! Register HERE.

Nat

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Creative Squad: Good Morning Good Evening – Judi Kauffman

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a post from Judi Kauffman that made me smile and chuckle using my Lady Liberty and Hydrant foam stamps and 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.

Stamping, Day & Night! 

Imagine my delight when Nathalie’s ArtFoamies arrived for this month’s project – Lady Liberty and Hydrant! Both spoke to this city girl’s heart. The theme fit both stamps very well, I thought. And they’re big enough to fill a card front with little else.

Day person, night person? I am a bit of both. My best energy is in the morning but sometimes my best ideas take shape at night How about you?

Project 1 – Statue of Liberty cards: 

Our godson and his family live in an apartment in Brooklyn that looks out at Lady Liberty so I get to say good morning and good night to her when I visit. Each time I see the statue I thank this country for welcoming my grandparents to this country of immigrants. 

I made a pair of very simple cards that allow the beautiful image to take a starring role. Tiny glitter dot stickers create the stars in a night sky and the rays of a noonday sun.

Project 2 – The Hydrant:

Every day and each night (and many times in between…) dogs out on walks with their owners get to check their email by sniffing the fire hydrant across the street from my house. I hand-cut a wagging tail for each card. The tail becomes shorthand for a dog, just enough to create the scene! The night version of the card has a fussy-cut hydrant, offset on foam squares so the one stamped on the background stays visible and becomes a shadow. 

Bonus – Other takes on a fire hydrant:

While I was at it, I stamped extra fire hydrants to fussy-cut for more cards. Some of the extras were quite pale because I was using up paint before cleaning the stamp to put away. One thing led to another and some of those extras got turned into a bird, a vase filled with flowers, and a strange big-eyed creature wearing a knit hat. 

Have fun turning fire hydrants into something else! And be sure to share what you come up with…

Thank you Judi for this creative group of projects and unique ways to look at the stamps!

Give it a try: you can find all my Foam Stamps in my Online Shop and here are some of the supplies Judi used:

Like what you see? Follow the Creative Squad on Instagram for weekly posts, artwork, and inspiration.

Nat

Comments (3)

  • Sue Clarke

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    Oh my…the tail to the hydrant! Funny story about our dog park. We don’t have hydrants in my area (we have many small ponds to draw water from via our fire trucks), and someone made some “fake” fire hydrants for the dog park and painted them red. The dogs from my area didn’t know what to do with them. The dogs who come up from MA “showed” the NH dogs how to pee on the hydrant. I’m not sure if that comes across as funny, but it made me laugh and your hydrants made me think of it!

    Reply

    • nathalie-kalbach

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      LOL- that is funny ! Don’t judge a dog by the fire hydrant LOL

      Reply

  • jean marmo

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    Such wonderful cards. Love the simplicity of Lady Liberty. So clever to add the tail to the hydrant. I love how you turned them into other things!

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Creative Squad: Good Morning Good Evening – Jordan Hill

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a journal spread from Jordan Hill who creates a moody night scene using my Powerhouse and Row Houses foam stamps and 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.

Hello, everyone! I’m very excited to be back with a new project! When I first started to consider August’s theme of ‘Good Morning Good Evening’, I’ll admit I was a little stumped. I do not consider myself either a morning person or a night person; I’m more of a middle of the day kind of person. With that being said, I ended up creating my project based on the idea of night; I quite like the nighttime aesthetics, and I’ve been known to incorporate a good night skyline into my artwork. With all that being said, let’s get into it!

The first thing I did was select a spread in my journal to work on. As soon as I decided to work with the idea of night, I knew these were the pages I wanted to use. Months ago I glued this moon collage piece onto a magazine background, and it’s been sitting around waiting for me to create something with it ever since! You can also see that the left hand page already has the beginnings of a face ready for me to draw on top of!

Next, I cut out a piece of paper approximately the size of the moon to use as a mask. I placed this circle on top of the moon collage piece. Then, using a combination of Nathalie’s Powerhouse Foam Stamp and Row Houses Foam Stamp, along with some white acrylic paint, I started to layer up some buildings to create a skyline! I mainly used the Powerhouse Foam Stamp near the bottom of my page, while the Row Houses Foam Stamp helped to create some of the buildings up the sides! The stamps made creating a skyline very easy, where it would usually take a while to draw something like this!

After the paint had dried, I wanted to add a little more definition to the buildings, so I used a yellow Posca Pen to color in some of the windows! This was an extremely relaxing process; I simply followed some of the lines in the stamped images to emphasize them.

The next step was to add the figure. In order to do this, I simply started sketching over top of the pre-existing shape of a face with my trusty Indigo Prismacolor Premier colored pencil. I also added some long flowing hair. When I was drawing the hair, I purposefully made sure that it continued onto the right side in order to tie these two pages together a bit more.

Now we’re getting into the finishing touches of the spread! I finished up my figure by giving them a shirt made out of a piece of collage paper, adding some shading to the face, and outlining the entire thing with white pen. I then added a handful of silver star stickers across both pages, and repeated the same process of stamping with Nathalie’s Row Houses Foam Stamp and adding yellow Posca pen along the bottom of the right hand side of the spread. 

As a last detail, I added a quote along the edge of the figure’s hair that I felt was fitting. I decided not to outline the entire quote in white, but instead left that for the parts of the quote that were over darker parts of the page, where it was harder to read what was written.

And with that, we have my finished project for August! I’m quite happy with the way this month’s spread turned out and I definitely think I will be using these stamps again in the future to create skylines in my journals! I can already imagine it in neon! I hope you enjoyed following the process of this journal spread and that you are inspired to try something similar in your own journals!

Thank you Jordan – love how the skyline glows with those yellow details!

Give it a try: you can find all my Foam Stamps in my Online Shop and in addition to some collage elements, here are some of the supplies Jordan used:

Like what you see? Follow the Creative Squad on Instagram for weekly posts, artwork, and inspiration.

Did you miss yesterday’s Pattern Monday video in the email? Let’s try it again, here is yesterday’s video:

Nat

Comments (1)

  • Michelle Jones

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    Love love love this journal spread by Jordan Hill! This spread is A wonderful collaboration of ideas and creativity. Your blog brings a smile and a break form this busy crazy planet. Peace to you.

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Background Music Art Journal – Creative Squad

Riikka Kovasin from my Creative Squad shared this beautiful and bright art journal page last week and we are in love with the colors and composition. She used my new Row Houses and Brownstone foam stamps front and center.

Here is what Riikka had to say:

“The pink is Brownstone and brick red Row Houses. The background has Church and Powerhouse in there.

As Distress Ink is activated with water, I first cut the try out sheet into smaller piece, fitting inside my journal. I then used a wet brush to color the whole cardstock using the stamped images. On top I then layered some Izink ICE and then some acrylic paint covering parts of the buildings in the background. I cut the two buildings loose and added them to the page. There’s also some white scribbles, splashes and a sun/moon done using another try-out – a piece of synthetic paper with alcohol inks. “

Thank you Riikka for sharing this page!

Give it a try: you can find all my Foam Stamps in my Online Shop and here are some of the supplies Riikka used:

Nat

Comments (1)

  • Sue Clarke

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    Riikka, I so love these colors and the page and the moon!!

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Print Collaboration from my Creative Squad

I’m sharing a nice collaboration that Judi Kauffman from my Creative Squad did with another artist.

Judi turned her friend Nancy McNiff’s cast-off gel prints done with Nathalie’s Batik Pattern 1, Pattern 2, and Pattern 3 foam stamps into some very striking cards. When the two friends have gel printing days Judi always rescues prints that Nancy would otherwise leave in the trash. Nancy’s much more ruthless, while Judi sees beauty in what Nancy thinks of as duds! Judi added her own touches with black, white and hot pink colored pencils and Tim Holtz’s stickers. 

What a great idea to do some printmaking and card making with another friend. Besides it being a fun activity, you never know what will come from it – collage material, print exchanges, and even a chance to allow ideas to flow back and forth. I just love how this session created some beautiful “trash to treasure” cards!

***A fun surprise: The rectangles on the two larger cards are removable ATCs, signed on the back and held in place with easily removable low-tack tape!***

Here are some of the supplies they used:

Nat

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Spill your heART – Episode 6 and Upcoming

If you didn’t catch our Spill your heART Episode 6, you can watch a recording below. I was joined by Birgit Koopsen, Amanda Trought, and DeeDee Catron to discuss Artistic Inspiration – Finding the Magic.

Here is an overview of the webinar:

In Episode 6 I discuss Artistic Inspiration with my panelists Birgit Koopsen, Amanda Trought, and DeeDee Catron. Inspiration is the magic behind creativity but it is not always readily available and in the opposite extreme it can be overwhelming. We began our discussion with a simple question: How do you find it and then what do you do with it?

My panelists shared their tips for finding inspiration including creative play, gardening, neighborhood walks, travel, art journaling, collaborations, assignments/deadlines, and the people in our lives. While primarily we draw from visual sources, we also discussed how music, food, and even smells could spark an idea. Sometimes we have too many ideas and lean on lists and schedules to stay focused and productive.

It’s ok to take a break from creating and we talked about avoiding the pressure to make every day. With that in mind, extended breaks can make it hard to get the magic flowing again and we shared some of the creative activities that we do that are not about making art but are never-the-less creative like dance, cooking, and reading that also help us get back.

Join us for the next one on August 27th:

Spill your heART Episode 7: Nat’s Creative Squad – Design Team Talk

Join our design team discussion with Nat’s Creative Squad members Robin Seiz, Riikka Kovasin, Nicole Watson, and Emilie Murphy. Our panel will talk about what it takes to join and flourish on a design team, how they approach assignments, the fun and challenge of participating, and what they take away from the experience. Nat’s Creative Squad has been around since 2016 and has been host to a variety of members with a broad range of styles and backgrounds. Get to know some of them a bit better and bring your questions about design teams, mixed media art making, and the idea of creativity on assignment.

Friday, August 27th at 12noon EDT (NYC time) – Register HERE to attend.

Nat

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