Creative Squad

Creative Squad: Creating Connections – Riikka Kovasin

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a post and video from Riikka Kovasin who has created a beautiful art journal page using my new LOVE foam stamp and inspired by our theme: Creating Connections – We’re playing along with the Creative JumpStart 2022 theme Creating Connections and exploring how our artwork connects us to the world around us, our community, our favorite supplies, or maybe our artmaking choices. Connections are everywhere when we create!


Evolve

Hello! It’s Riikka here today with the first Nathalie’s Creative Squad project of 2022! So exciting – a brand new year to unfold and inspire! As you probably know already, this month we’re drawing inspiration from Creative JumpStart topic “Creating Connections”.

I’m super honored to say that I’m one of the teachers in the CJS22. When Nathalie held the announcement live, I threw an idea about being inspired by your culture, creating a connection to that. Naturally, your culture is a part of you and probably everything you do is connected to you. You see the world though your eyes, your perspective, so your cultural heritage is bound to shine through one way or the other. But for this project I decided to use my culture more clearly, drawing inspiration from the national epic, Kalevala. 

The first thing I did was to see the LOVE stamp with a new pair of eyes, though. I didn’t want to use it as such, to have the title be “Love”. Instead, I thought what other words I could make using the same letters. I pondered both English and Finnish words and finally settled to “evolve” as I could use that so many ways. When I then had the theme word, it was easy to decide which Kalevala part to use. I chose to go with the creation of the world, the primordial sea and Ilmatar, the air maiden.

In the Kalevala the world is created when a spirit of the air, Ilmatar, descends from the skies to the sea to bathe as she’s bored. She becomes pregnant from the wind. She spends quite some time in the ocean and a water bird, a scaup makes a nest on her knee. When Ilmatar then goes into labor, she moves her knee and the eggs fall to the sea. The broken eggs make up the earth, sky and rest of the world. The baby of Ilmatar on the other hand is Väinämöinen. He’s the hero of Kalevala, a skilled sorcerer and one of the main characters of the epic. I find it intriguing that the epic puts the start of the world to the ocean like the scientists nowadays think life started, in the primordial sea. With this on my mind as well, I set out to make a sea.

I used a gel printing plate to make myself a stash of blue papers first. For those I used the stamp as it is, spelling “love”. I also patterned the prints with a packaging from glue sticks. I’ve come across of the piece previously and it stayed in my mind as I then failed to gather it to my stash. But now that I happened to run into it again, I took it home. The pattern is really nice and you can use the part two ways, either leaving dots or rings to the plate. I then tore the printed papers in strips and layered them partly on top of each other making a sea with foam on top of the waves. If you want to see yourself how I made it, please see the video underneath.

As you could see from the video, I patterned the letters by using paint markers. I chose patterns that I connect to Kalevala, like the joined stylized hands, a pattern a little reminiscent of running dog pattern. It’s another connection created!

Thank you for stopping by today! Wishing you a splendid 2022! Xoxo Riikka


Thank you Riikka – loved learning this legend and seeing how that inspired your page, and seeing how you reconfigured the letters in the foam stamp to create something different!

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

Comments (2)

  • Robin Seiz

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    Rikka,

    It’s so awesome that you saw the word love in a totally different way! It’s a beautiful page, I love the colors too.

    Robin

    Reply

  • jjhere

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    Gorgeous! I love those colors and what a beautiful story of how you are inspired to create this.

    Reply

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Creative Squad: Creating Connections – Maura Hibbitts

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a gorgeous art journal spread from Maura Hibbitts using the CJS22 Limited Edition LOVE foam stamp and my ATC Mixup stencil. Our theme is Creating Connections – We’re playing along with the Creative JumpStart 2022 theme Creating Connections and exploring how our artwork connects us to the world around us, our community, our favorite supplies, or maybe our artmaking choices. Connections are everywhere when we create!


Hello 2022! Wishing each of you a joyous and healthy new year! What a fun month this will be as we play along with Creative Jumpstart. I love the theme of Creating Connections: it opens up so many ideas. Just think about the many connections we each have – family and friends, the cashier at the grocery, coworkers, art muses, neighbors, ancestors… no matter where we live on this planet, we are connected to each other.

I headed to my art journal to work out my idea of hands holding love. I was thinking about how we need to nurture love and keep it safe for it to grow. I chose to work in rainbow colors to symbolize the diversity of humans around the world and how love connects us all.

Begin in your art journal with a few dabs of acrylic paint in blues and greens. Use a dry brush and spread and blend it across the page(s). Add more of a color if the other seems to dominate until you are happy with the background.

Blend one of the blues with white paint to lighten it. Use a cosmetic sponge, a bit of paint, and Nathalie’s ATC Mixup stencil to add another layer to the background. Just add the image here and there on your pages.

Time to make some hands! Sketch out a hand that looks cupped to hold something, onto watercolor paper…don’t worry too much about it, mine are far from perfect, but do give the idea. Cut out the hand, then flip it over and cut a second – this will give you the opposite hand. Paint the hands. (I used oranges and purples for contrast.) Stencil a design onto each hand with the ATC Mixup stencil. I added white to purple paint to lighten the color for the purple hand, and used a darker orange for the stenciling on the other one.

Use black archival ink with the Art Foamies Love stamp, and stamp it directly onto your page. Be sure the paint is dry first. (You can always speed it up with a heat tool if you are impatient like me.)

Adhere the hands so they look like they are holding the word Love. You can use a glue stick or adhesive tape for this. Outline them with a black pen to give them some detail.  Note – one hand went across the center fold, so I cut a bit off, and lined up each piece with a bit of space so the book will close.

Add some journaling to the opposite page.  I like to use a T square to eyeball some lines and sketch them with a pencil. Next, pencil in your words. Now, you can go over them with a black marker or pen. Once you are finished with the lettering and it is completely dry, erase the lines and penciled letters.

I wanted a positive focus for my journaling, and added “Love and kindness connect us together around the world.” As you can see, I varied the type faces and sizes to add interest.

Love is such a powerful connecting force and we can sure use more of it in our lives and around the world.

Let’s support and nurture the connections we have, with love and kindness, and make our world brighter for everyone in 2022. Happy New Year! Maura


Thank you Maura – such a perfect message as we begin the new year and I love how those hands are nurturing that LOVE stamp.

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

Looking for more projects? Follow the Creative Squad on Instagram here.

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LOVE – Special Edition Foam Stamp

I’ve got some exciting Foam Stamp News! I’ve designed a Limited Edition Foam Stamp for Creative JumpStart 2022  called LOVE. Our theme for CJS22 is Creating Connections and what better connection is there than love?

LOVE is of course perfect for cards. I mean, what more need I say? Ok, I did add a little bit more like my Love Knots rubber stamp, but really if you just want to get to the point, LOVE is all you need.

LOVE will be a limited edition release – only available through December 2022 so supplies are limited and when 2023 rolls around they will all be gone… so don’t miss out.

How would you like a little LOVE?

Foam stamps are so versatile – they rock when you need to churn out some quick cards or maybe do a repeating pattern for some giftwrap or a cool background… I especially love layering up two colors to get a nice offset print look.

They’re also excellent with fabric paints and even on the wall if you’re really ambitious. And we can’t forget the possibilities of just letting loose and working in an art journal. Who doesn’t LOVE that?

You can get LOVE in my online shop here. Haha

And get ready to use LOVE in Creative JumpStart 2022 Creating Connections edition too! CJS22 goes on sale on Monday, November 29th at 8am and I promise you – Cyber Monday will not disappoint ;)

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