ArtyFartyAnnie

Hi Everyone, Just in the nick of time, here's my February journal page inspired by the amazing Tim Holtz Tags of 2016 - this year, Tim is revisiting tutorials from previous years and combining two techniques to create a new tag. Here's his gorgeous February tag, which combined monoprinting with stencils and heat embossing with texture paste ... This year, I'm making little pages instead of tags, so I can keep them all together in the gorgeous leather bound journal which my friend Trina gave me for Christmas. On the back of each page I will make notes about the techniques used to create it - so it should be a handy reference. Here's my version of Tim's February tag ... As luck would have it, I had recently treated myself to a pack of these wonderfully quirky vintage passport photos from Tim Holtz so this was the perfect opportunity to use one - although it was difficult to choose which one to use!

Hi everyone, I'm a day and several hours late to the party this week, but as I did TAKE the photos I thought I would join in anyway! If you haven't been already, pop over to Stamping Ground , say hi to our lovely hostess Julia and check out what's been happening on crafty desks all over the world this week. Yesterday afternoon I squeezed in a little bit of arty farty time to do my February tag as inspired by Tim Holtz' Tags of 2016  ... although this year I'm doing little pages instead of actual tags. This was taken when I had just got started ... ... just a couple pages from my little journal, some Distress Stains and Paints, brushes and my Essential Manky Cloth of course! This next one was about 15 minutes later ...

Hi everyone, It's been a little quiet on the creative front around here lately - other stuff getting in the way again! - but I've been trying to squeeze a little time to play every day, and I finally finished my Quirky Bird picture for week six of LifeBook 2016 ... In this lesson, Tamara Laporte of Willowing Arts  invited us to celebrate our Quirky Amazing Life, by painting Quirky Birds to represent what we love and are grateful for. One of the big revelations of this week for me was that I can use my felt pens as water colours - WOW!!! Tam used Tombo markers, but I found it worked really well with my Wispa pens too. I love how you get a watercolour effect, but the colours are more intense. Unfortunately the light was very poor when I took these pictures so it doesn't really show here, but I will definitely be getting lots more use from my felt pens from now on. Here's a closer look at my quirky characters ...

Hi Everyone, I'm sure almost anyone who may read this will know that feeling that there is never enough time in the day to squeeze in everything we try to fit in to it. One of my promises to myself this year is to get more organised in order to make sure I get the necessities done AND make the most of my spare time. Planners are everywhere online at the moment and they looked like such a fun way of getting organised, so of course I just had to have one! I found a relatively cheap one from Collins and I've had loads of fun stuffing it with home-made accessories and filling it full of some of my favourite things - it's been a great way to use up some of my crafty stash :o) So here's a peek inside my shiny new pink planner ... There are three things here that actually came out of this year's Christmas crackers! the little golden notebook tucked into a pocket on the left, the black plastic giant paperclip and the disco ball! I <3 disco balls :o)

Hello lovely Deskers, Wednesday has rolled around again, and a very chilly blowy one it is this week. No time to play today, and my desk is sort of between-projects tidy for a change ... On it you can see the dodgy flower painting I showed you last week - thanks to your kind words of encouragement, I didn't give up on it, but decided to do a little more work on it and then I got to a point where I was ready to call it finished and move on to the next Life Book project. Thanks to the suggestion from LLJ Jan - I knocked back some of the scarier colour a bit, then remembered I had some transparent gesso. This seals the layer beneath, but leaves it visible and with a good "tooth" to work onto. This enabled me to add some shading, highlights and details with various pencils, crayons and pens. I'm still not that enamoured of it, but I've decided to embrace it as part of my Life Book journey and it will have a place amongst all the others which I'll be creat...