Blog Hoppin'

Welcome to the Inchie Arts and StencilGirl Blog Hop!

Hi, it's me Kae Pea! Owner and artist at RubberMoon.
We are so excited to be a part of this hop.
Here at RubberMoon we love Inchie Arts art squares and StencilGirl stencils!

I created a great piece of framed art using a few supplies and I wanted to share this fun project with you.

Here are the materials I used for my piece of art:

• 4" Inch Inchie Art Square (I used white but other colors would be great too!)
• Wheel In the Sky Stencil ( I designed this one but there are so many awesome stencils to choose from!)
• gouache and acrylic paints ( I used my favorites but you choose yours!)
• paint brush
• baby wipes 
• RubberMoon stamp "True Free Spirit" (this one is by Mindy Lacefield and there are so many more great sayings and images at RubberMoon.com!)
• ready made frame with a 4 x 4 opening
• black ink pad

1. Paint your Inchie Art Square with gouache*
(it is important to use gouache for this layer so you
can easily remove color with your baby wipe.
 you may use acrylic, but it will not come up as easily.)

2. Place the portion of your stencil that you want to use
over your painted Art Square and remove
color with your baby wipe by gently rubbing and patting.

3. Remove your stencil and now paint and stamp with acrylic
paints. I used some texture/mixed media stamps from RubberMoon.

Here is my Inchie Art Square...painted, stenciled and ready to stamp!

I used the "true free spirit stamp" I only used the words
"free spirit" by masking off the word "true"...
I placed my finished art into a 4 x 4 white frame.

Would make a great gift but also looks perfect in my studio!

Thank you for visiting! And thank you to Inchie Arts and StencilGirl for inviting us to hop!

Leave a comment ON ANY (or all) of the blogs involved in the hop as your entry

We'll be picking one lucky winner to receive a 

$25 StencilGirl Gift Certificate and

1 package each of White 4", 3", ATC (2.5" X 3.5") and Swatch (2" X 4") size Art Squares!

All comments left on the hop list participants’ posts will be entered. 

One comment per blog. 

Comments close on January 30^th @ 11:59PM Central.
Winner will be announced on January 31^st.

January 25

StencilGirl Talk
Mary C. Nasser
Mary Beth Shaw
Lisa Lee

January 26 
StencilGirl Talk
Maria McGuire
Gwen Lafleur
Dina Kowal

January 27 
StencilGirl Talk
Janet Joehlin
Sharon Harnist
Kae Pea  <<<YOU ARE HERE! Thank you for coming by!

Given to Whimsy

I could go on and on about what attracts me to RubberMoon's stamps. 

I could tell you how awed I am by the quality of the product, the variety, the artistry, etc. 

But if I had to sum it up in one word? 

That word would be whimsical.

I love RubberMoon's stamps because they are whimsical. 

Which means they play right into my flights of fancy 

and my inability to take art seriously.

So, when I saw the catfish and the "Holy catfish!" sentiment stamps,

I had to have them. Had to.

For this card, I began with one of my favorite background techniques.

This one is so easy and so much fun!


Begin by smooshing (that's a technical term, right?) various ink pads 

on a non-stick craft sheet.

Spritz the inked sheet with water and swirl the colors around.


You can use an old chopstick for this, 

but I like to get messy, so I just use my finger.

Then just gently place a piece of glossy paper on to it.

Lift it up, and ta-dah!

The bonus is that there's usually enough left over smooshy stuff

on the mat to do another background, 

and it'll be completely different from the first.

Next, I stamped the catfish in green on the background.

I wanted to make the head and tail different from the body, 

so I stamped that in brown on a separate piece of paper.

I cut the head and tail of the brown catfish and set it aside.

I added some glitter to the green catfish's fins and

 colored in the eyes and whiskers on the brown catfish head.

The background seemed a little bare to me, 

so I sponged on some blue ink to give it a little more oomph 

(another technical term).

I added some fishy friends for my catfish 

using a Stencil Girl stencil, a sponge and brown ink.

After that, I added some seaweed using RubberMoon's Large Fern stamp

as well as the "Holy Catfish!" sentiment.

The only thing left to do was to assemble the piece.

I used some double stick spacing tape for the brown catfish head and tail 

to make them stand out from the page a little bit.

I glued the piece to some matching green cardstock,

then glued that to my card base.

Now I can send it on its way and fill a friend's day with whimsy!


For more of a glimpse into my whimsical world, please stop by my blog at:
In the Studio With Barb


Happy New Year!

Joy

December is a frenetic month in so many ways, but there are moments to stop, think, and reflect scattered all through the month.  I had some of those moments this week when we spent some time riding in the car with soft holiday music playing.  I LOVE to look at Christmas lights as many times during the month as I can.  Tonight was no exception.  There is always familiarity, of course, with all the icons of the season, but there is something new to experience every year if you really look closely.  I love to see the color changes in the whites, the lines people choose to accentuate outside, the color trends, and love the variety of wreathes.

I feel the same way about ornaments.  I love to fall in love with them every year when we are hanging them.  (Yes, I have weeded some out through the years, so the ones I have made the cut.)When I saw these ornaments by Rubbermoon, I knew they would be perfect for my "Victorian" era Christmas project.

Stamp references:  white and black border (db4986i catalog p. 60), spiral ornament (mk264a catalog p. 89), checkerboard ornament (ge2551c catalog p. 86),  stars and swirls on ball (I drew the topper), and my all-time favorite word, joy.

I have been obsessed with manipulating Citrasolv backgrounds so I took a random National Geographic page that had already been sprayed with Citrasolv in a National Geographic and left to dry while the magazine was still intact.  For more info on this process, visit the tutorials on my blog in September and October. So, as you can see below, this piece is torn straight out of the magazine.  I didn't trim it down so you could see the raw manipulation (totally happenstance).  I believe the original picture was some kind of cricket match.  I chose it only for color.  I went in search of a page with green and then fell in love with the peachy secondary color on this page.  This page was done around six weeks ago, but you can rework it after the fact.  I make piles of pages.  Become best friends with someone with a National Geographic stash.  You'll be glad you did. 

 These are some of the supplies I use when reworking a page.  I often use India ink and dip pens, stencils, stamps, paint brushes, etc.  That's only the tip of the iceberg, though. 

For this particular design, I chose to remove a pattern around the edges with Terri Stegmiller's Layered Salad stencil.  I did first cut down the design to remove the text from the article and to have a workable size.  The detail picture below shows which part of the stencil I used with a paper towel scrap lightly dipped in Citrasolv.  I was able to remove a lot of the green, leaving the peach behind. The second picture below shows the finished border. 

Now it was time to make this into something interesting.  I started by stamping the white and black border stamp in the middle using Black StazOn. This addition of black pushed the background back where I wanted it and began the composition.

I continued with the ornaments, starting the ball in the lower right corner, and then the checkerboard ornament in the upper left corner.  I rough cut a mask of the checkerboard ornament and placed it over the stamped image so that I could stamp the third spiral ornament behind.  I hand drew lines and made a ornament top with a XS Pitt Artist Pen.

To compliment the composition by I then masking off all but one side of the border stamp and stamping it along the perimeter for a repeat pattern.  I added some black into the border with another great stencil by Joanne Sharpe for the StencilGirl's Club. Then I finished it off with the simple word joy at the bottom.  Now who would have thought this was a cricket game????  That's the beauty of creating art from something else.  I know.  You now know, but no one else would see anything except a complex background. 

While I liked this so far, but it still needed some tactile texture so I mounted all of it with two sided tape to green cardstock, and then sliced a tiny bit of peach to slide under before adding it all to matte black heavy cardstock.  (I decided to make this a card, but this could also have been mounted and framed.) I then took my all-time favorite PPA matte glue from USArtquest and some of their Guilt Trip pearls and went to town using my toothpick with a little bit of PPA to pick up the Prills right from the container.  The antiqued gold color and organic nature of the Prills was perfect to finish off the ornaments.

I love to do oddly colored Christmas pieces.  It keeps it fresh for me!  I hope you enjoyed it.  Rubbermoon has oodles of other Christmas and holiday stamps.  Check them out and please comment with any technique questions you might have here, my website or on my facebook art page. I'll see you on my blog on December 24 for holiday part 2, a holiday gift from Rubbermoon and me.

Friday Feature

Hooray! It's Friday! And, so, to mark the beginning of a (hopefully) artful weekend, we thought we would have a little fun and feature some of our favorite images, products and ideas!!
Here goes....
We LOVE Inchie Arts! These are high quality, artist grade materials for creating small format works of art! They are the perfect foundation for making all types of great projects.They work wonderfully with both wet and dry color application.  

Look at these Inchie Arts products! They come in other great neutral colors and black too!

We LOVE stencils! StencilGirl Products make great artist stencils and they are owned and operated here in RubberMoon's neck of the woods too! (We love USA made!)

Take a look at this cool stencil, designed by RubberMoon's own, Kae Pea!

And finally, we thought we would feature a favorite RubberMoon image! This image is 'vintage' RubberMoon. It was one of the first stamps in the original 1993 catalog and still is a much loved image today! It is the art of Jane Cather.  Cool stamp huh? Just love Jane's work...

RubberMoon item # jc631h It is titled, night hair.

That is our Friday Feature for today. We hope it gets you thinking about how you will be creative this weekend! So pull out all of your inchies, stencils and stamps and PLAY!!

Sending Moonbeams,