Time Marches On and Textured Tag Play

  Wow, it's March already -YAY!! It's going to be a busy month with St. Patrick's Day, Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, not to mention our clocks Spring ahead 1 hour for Sun. the 10th, and I'll be celebrating my birthday and one year of blogging on the 15th!

  So first up is my calendar spread for March. Here are the background pages:

 

 

  I used a fave technique-dots of Folk Art Patina, Americana Snow, Golden Cobalt Teal, and Masters Touch Olive Green around the pages. I scraped over the pages with an old credit card, moving the colors to cover. I then used the Mini Cubist stencil with Dylusions Bubblegum Pink Ink Spray.

 

 My pages ready:

 

 

   I'm not going to fill the space along the right side until later as I may want to add some pics from the festivities of the month. I'll be checking out what others have done this month over at The Kathryn Wheel - Kate Crane's blog.

 

  And now for some tag play! If you missed Carolyn Dube's "Use Your Words Workshop" you can still join this free series and be a part of the Flickr group too. It really was a fabulous series of videos and it's been fun creating from her inspirations!

 

  For this part Carolyn suggested using three tags and creating similar-but not the same-projects. We started by applying thick coats of gesso around the tags and allowing them to dry overnight.

 

 

    The gesso had been spread around with a palette knife. On the first tag I stamped into the wet gesso with a cork. For the center tag I mixed a bit of Golden Coarse Pumice Gel (think wet sand texture) into the wet gesso and on the third tag I just aded marks with the tip of the palette knife.

 

  Now for some color!

 

 

  For the first tag I colored with Caran D'Ache watercolor crayons and a waterbrush. For the second tag I used Dylusions Vibrant Turquoise and Bubblegum Pink Ink Sprays then added a bit of blue watercolor crayon on two corners for deeper color. On the third tag I again used watercolor crayons and a waterbrush.

 

  Here is a detail of the third tag before adding water. You can really see the texture and cork marks in the gesso:

 



 

  And here is a detail pic of the second tag:

 



 

 

  Isn't that texture with the Coarse Pumice gel just FAB??? Here's another where I used the gel:

 

 

 



 

 

     First I scraped the gel thru a words stencil and let dry. Then I sprayed with a few colors of ink sprays.

 

   Now, as the workshop is about using words I finished my three  tags with stencilled letters and a simple embellishment:

 

 

  

  

 

 





 

 

 Ready to add to journal pages!



 

  I'll be joining my friends at Art Journal Everyday, Kate Crane's Calendar project , Paint Party Friday and Inspiration Avenue.

 

  Have a great weekend!

 

" Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."  Edgar Degas