Creative Squad

Out and About – Michelle Rydell

  

Hello from the Creative Squad!  This month the Creative Squad will be playing along with my Stroll Challenge and today Michelle Rydell is sharing a really cool canvas panel using my Stroll Through the Hood #2 stamp set, and working with the prompt words Sky and Loud and the theme Out and About – Sometimes it’s hard to see all the cool and inspiring stuff that’s right under our noses. This month we hope you will join us in our 30 day Stroll Challenge and get Out and About where you live, and find some local inspiration.

I took a bit of a different direction with my prompt word – Loud. You see, when I lived in the city, there was loudness everywhere and I loved it; but now that I live in the country, the neighborhood is just the opposite. It’s very quiet, and I love that too. So I had to think about it awhile; and then it hit me. What’s loud in a different way, and also connects my old neighborhood in the city to my new one in the country? The gloriously loud colors of the sunset!

This was my photo for the prompt “sky,” and I’m also using it for “loud.”

My idea was to recreate the colors of a city sunset with watercolors. Here is the step-by-step…

I first stamped the Main Station and Warehouse stamps from Nat’s Stroll Through the Hood #2 stamp set numerous times onto dictionary paper, to give it a bit of a grungy look…

I cut out the buildings and arranged them on the background till I had them how I wanted them to be. This gave me an idea of where to start with the watercolors…

I put the buildings to the side, and started on the sky. In order to create soft edges and allow the colors to blend, I wet the paper first… From there I slowly started building the layers of color, always allowing them to bleed together. They were very light at first, but with each layer got more intense…

Stars were added to the sky by flicking some high flow acrylic with a stiff brush…

When the page was completely dry, I pasted down the buildings with a glue stick. The warehouse in the back was colored with a light grey tombow marker, to make it recede a bit…

I outlined each building with a stabilo pencil and added water to grunge it up a bit. I also added a mixture of stabilo pencil and grey acrylic to create a street in front of the buildings…

I finished off the page with a quote and outline done with paint marker; and some journaling on the bottom done with a white gel pen.

Thank you Michelle for a beautiful spread and a gorgeous cityscape :) She used these supplies – some links are affiliate links:



Play along with us this month and join the 30 day Artful Adventures Stroll Challenge! I love to see how you interpret our monthly themes. Email me how you used my stencils and stamps with the theme and email me an image – I would love to share your projects in my “n*Spiration From Around the Globe“.

Nat

Comments (5)

  • Diane T

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    Loved the city/country connection and the quote at the bottom. Great job!

    Reply

  • Sue Clarke

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    LOVE how you used the stamps and the colors you chose for the page.

    Reply

  • Julie Tucker

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    This is gorgeous! LOVING the colors and the buildings!!!!!!!!!!

    Reply

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Out and About – Marsha Valk

  

Hello my friends!  This month the Creative Squad is playing along with my Stroll Challenge and today Marsha Valk is sharing some super cool cards. She’s using my Stroll Through the Hood #1 & #2, Cardboard, and Embroidery stamp sets, and working with the prompt word Pattern and the theme Out and About – Sometimes it’s hard to see all the cool and inspiring stuff that’s right under our noses. This month we hope you will join us in our 30 day Stroll Challenge and get Out and About where you live, and find some local inspiration.

Merriam-Webster has 11(!) definitions for the word ‘Pattern’. One of these is:
3: an artistic, musical, literary, or mechanical design or form, the geometrical pattern of the carpet, the strict pattern of rhythm and rhyme for a sonnet — Gigi Marino

…and it’s super fitting for the pattern I saw whilst Out and About.

I see patterns everywhere and all the time: tiles, bricks, grids, shadows, on flora and fauna… and I have quite a library of photos of patterns found right here where I live in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. But… there is a different pattern plastered all over my city right now and this particular pattern ties my place of residence to New York. And as my assignment was to combine today’s Stroll Challenge prompt with the Stroll #2 stamps, going with this pattern made sense to me.

2017 has been declared the national year of De Stijl, because the art group was founded a hundred years ago, in 1917. Amersfoort is taking this opportunity to celebrate one of its most famous former residents: Piet Mondriaan (or: Mondrian).

Mondriaan was born in Amersfoort in 1872 and he died in Manhattan in 1944. He lived in Amersfoort until 1880, when his family moved to another part of the Netherlands.

His birth house in now a museum where you can see some of his early (still naturalist) works and learn about his life.

Now onto the project!

I started out playing in the journal I keep for the Stroll Challenge prompts and then moved on to square and rectangle pieces of cardstock. I didn’t have to think about colours. I searched my stash for suitable stamping inks in the De Stijl colour palette: red, yellow, blue, black, grey and white. I covered each base with gesso first because I felt the plain white paper was too flat and stark.

And then I just stamped my compositions on top, starting with the grids and then filling in the spaces with colour and pattern, using post-it tape and scraps of paper to mask off and protect parts of the design whilst stamping. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t feel that the compositions with straight lines looked right. So I tried some more on a diagonal square piece of cardstock, which I liked much better.

But then it occurred to me that having the paper diagonal wasn’t very practical for, for instance, making cards. So I continued to play with diagonal lines and blocks of colour and left the paper straight.

Once the ink was dry, I adhered the cards I liked best onto black folded notecards.


Conclusion: creating pleasing compositions with just blocks of colour and lines is much harder than you might think. I hope you try it too. It’s an interesting and fun exercise!

Thank you Marsha – these rock! And so cool that your ‘hood is celebrating such an important artist! Marsha used the following supplies (some are affiliate links):



Play along with us this month and join the 30 day Artful Adventures Stroll Challenge! I love to see how you interpret our monthly themes. Email me how you used my stencils and stamps with the theme and email me an image – I would love to share your projects in my “n*Spiration From Around the Globe“.

Nat

Comments (2)

  • jbonomo

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    thank you for the inspiration today! Love the transition from the physical idea to paper. I will have to try this.

    Reply

  • Michelle

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    This is so much fun. I’m from The Hague (also in the Netherlands) and my city is also covered in Mondriaan prints. The “gemeentemuseum” has a year long Mondriaan exhibit.

    I love your interpretation of all this and how you translated it into your own art, Marsha!

    Xx Michelle

    Reply

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Out and About – Tina Walker

  

Hello from the Creative Squad!  This month the Creative Squad will be playing along with my Stroll Challenge and today Tina Walker is starting us off with a really cool mixed media project using my Stroll Through the Hood #2 stamp set, and working with the theme Out and About – Sometimes it’s hard to see all the cool and inspiring stuff that’s right under our noses. This month we hope you will join us in our 30 day Stroll Challenge and get Out and About where you live, and find some local inspiration.

Hi! Tina Walker here today with my take on this month’s theme, ‘Out and About’. During the month of May, as part of n*Studio’s 30 day Stroll Challenge and getting out in my neighborhood, I thought it would be fun to take one of the photographs from the challenge and use it as inspiration for my project. We hope you will join us this month and get out and about and say hello to your neighbors and enjoy the spring weather.

To kick off the STROLL, I used this photograph as inspiration this month. I was ‘strolling’ to my mailbox and captured this shot of my walk, mid stride.

Because my stroll was taking me to the mailbox, I immediately spied the fabulous Mailbox stamp include in the ‘Stroll Through the Hood #2’ stamp set. It was serendipitous!

I haven’t created a trio of ATC cards for a while, so I thought I’d pull out some blanks and get creating.

To create the background of each ATC, I covered each blank with a sheet of dictionary paper. I then heat embossed the Warehouse, Main Station, and E-Train stamps also included in the set.

I added lots of distressing with Distress Oxide inks, reacting the inks with water.

The mailbox embellishments were created by stamping into oven back clay. Once hardened and cooled, I distressed each piece with acrylic paint.

To finish each ATC scene, I added people die-cuts, stamped fabric sentiments, and a hand-cut and colored Flag stamp (also included in the set).

Each ATC was machine stitched to a scrap piece of leather and cotton batting, incorporating a fabric ‘hanger’.

I love how my patriotic ATCs turned out. Each vignette made me think about the generations of people, strolling to their neighborhood mailboxes, sending well wishes, happy thoughts, and joyous news. It seems all so simple and uncomplicated, in our new world of electronic media, and impersonal communication.

I hope you enjoyed my project today and join us this month. Have a great day!

Thank you Tina for taking us back in time and inspiring us to get Out and About wherever we live! In addition to scrap fabric and a sewing machine, Tina used these supplies – some links are affiliate links:



Play along with us this month and join the 30 day Artful Adventures Stroll Challenge! I love to see how you interpret our monthly themes. Email me how you used my stencils and stamps with the theme and email me an image – I would love to share your projects in my “n*Spiration From Around the Globe“.

Nat

Comments (5)

  • Sue Clarke

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    Love those “romantic” ATC’s Tina. My favorite is the optimist one.
    Perfect for Memorial Day and 4th of July coming up!

    Reply

  • julie b

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    oooh! What a great post….I love that mailbox stamp and it was cool to see the embossed buildings in the background. Just might have to try this technique with the fire hydrant as my walks to the mailbox always include walking the pug (who likes to mark the neighborhood gnome as every other dog has done so too). Shhh, she also has a favorite mailbox she likes to mark (the only one out of 60+ in the neighborhood).

    Reply

  • Gerrie!

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    These are really awesome Tina!! Love how you incorporated the stamps into the background, and people!

    Funny thing….I live in a different area…southwest Florida – where I live we don’t have sidewalks, few houses…we have no mailboxes except for the ones in front of peoples homes, and a blue box in front of the post office. If I go for a stroll, I see some houses, and lots of vacant lots! We have no factories or industry……….our oldest house was built in the late 1950’s! I will really have to put my thinking cap on to play along.

    Reply

    • nathalie-kalbach

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      You can take a pic of your mailbox, from an angle, upside down – it can be also your postoffice or anything- think in the widest sense, make up your own rules ;)

      Reply

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