digital collage "remember"

Made for a challenge at Scrapbook Graphics, my primary digital hangout.

Had to use the birds on a wire, the large green scrap on the right, and the large red scrap above it.

I added a ton of other stuff, layer upon layer, played with blending and opacity quite a bit.

I really like this one...

painting colors challenge

I forget exactly how we got started on this but we decided to choose a famous painting and do something with the colors in it. After looking at way too many paintings, we chose The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir. The book by the same name is a fictionalized account of how it came to be painted and is a fun read.

Rhonda stopped by Home Depot one day and grabbed a bunch of paint chips, then we narrowed it down to 5 colors, plus black and white.

Then we ground to a halt and neither of us did anything with it for a couple months, mainly because we hadn't set enough guidelines, I think. When she was here on Sunday, we decided simply to each do a journal page in those colors.

I was in the mood this evening after our early lamb chop dinner and got mine done. Scraped blue paint with a credit card for the background. Dug thru my box of misc collage stuff for mulberry paper in a couple of the colors, found a quote I liked, some eyes, a few 1" punched circles and went to work.

Someone whose blog I follow (too lazy to go look thru the list of 80 blogs) uses quinacridone / nickel azo gold to great effect in their work, so while at Michael's the other day, I picked up a bottle. It wasn't marked, but the large bottle was $20 so I knew it wouldn't be cheap. Got to the register, the girl scans the little 1oz bottle and exclaims, "Oh my god! It must be marked wrong!"

No, I said, it's just very expensive and handed her my 50% off coupon. So far I've used about 3 drops of it here and there and am learning how it works. Great accent color. I used it on this page as the centers of the circles on the green strip of gelli print toward the bottom.

By the time Steve got back from his coffee-and-reading-in-the-car run, I was done. I handed it to him and his eyes went immediately to the only thing on the page that made any sense to him.

"Uh... I like the stamps."

more mail art

MailMeSomeArt has a collage challenge where you have to use only the items on a given collage sheet. You can cut them up but you can't add anything. 

I cut up a bunch of old file folders from work into 6"x8" pieces and folded them in half so that I'd have a final 4"x6" postcard. Stamped a text stamp on the bare card, then glued down a sheet of gelli printed deli paper. The deli paper is somewhat transparent when glued down so the stamping shows thru to varying degrees depending on how thick the gelli paint is. Very cool look.

Then I cut out all the collage sheet pieces and played with them for a few minutes. They pretty much divided themselves into two piles - the medicine ones and the money man ones.

The medicine pile brought to mind the phrase "take two and call me in the morning" so the card came together quickly, including punching out "pills" from the blue strip of paper and gluing them down. Annoyingly fiddly little things, especially when your fingers are sticky.

 The money man pile made me think of the saying "more money than brains," so I made a card based on that. Every time I see a head cut open with things flying out, it cracks me up so I did one of those with the pennies. The other elements just sort of filled in the other half of the card. I quite like this one and will prolly make an ATC or two with those same elements.

MWO challenge

Another month, another challenge from Gail at Shabby Cottage. Here's mine, digital again. She supplied the digital collage image in the frame - the woman, roses, Eiffel tower, "Paris". I added the frame and all the other stuff.

I debated doing this because of the voting. I have a problem with being one of the losers. Not that I have to win everything, but years ago I quit entering contests because it was depressing to me to not do well. Comparison is the thief of joy, as the saying goes. However, I liked this image and figure I just won't go look at the blog while the voting is going on. Check the link above in a few days cause it's a lot of fun to see what everyone did with the same image. And you can vote, if you're so inspired.

Click on image for a bigger view.

Collage Obsession challenge ATCs

The current Collage Obsession challenge was to use an image of the couple provided.

A few days ago I made up a bunch of ATC blanks with various patterned papers and grabbed a couple that went with the greens and browns in the image. These are what I ended up with.

I deepened the green on the lapel for the first one to better go with the paper and the stamp ink. They sort of look like they're whispering so I paged thru an old book until I found a bit of dialog that fit.

I also can't quite decide if the one on the right is a woman dressed as a man. Maybe it's a costume party?




For the second one, I added a strip of old postcard, a little image of a ship, and a few doo-dads up in the corner to fill in that area.

I love the background paper on this one. It's from a small pack I bought when I first got into collaging and I'll be sorry when it's gone.


I'm happy with both of these, but think I like the bottom one best.

I tinkered with the image in Photoshop and intensified the colors. I may do a couple more in a stronger palette.

GreenPaper November Challenge

I'm not so sure about this one. The challenge was to use the image of the baby, the elephant and a small faintly lined sheet of paper with a spray of flowers - all in one collage. Baby and flowers - yes. The elephant? Not so much. but I needed to cover the front of the little book I'm using to do various challenges in and what could be more appropriate than a real challenge?

While leafing thru a book for inspiration, I passed by the copyright and publishing info at the front. Hmmm... publishing... pachyderm. At least they both started with a P. Anyway, I ended up doing this:

I reduced the size of the elephant image in Photoshop, then cut him from his background and did some layering with a strip of old book and a piece of my seemingly endless Starbucks scone bag from a couple weeks ago. (I've gotten more use from that scone bag) I'm not real sure what he's supposed to be doing down there but I was pretty stuck for ideas.

I see all sorts of things wrong with this now - too many different shapes, only the one element has any color - but live and learn. I guess I like the overall impression, but now that I'm done, all sorts of ideas have popped into my head. I may do another one or two using these 3 images, just to prove that I can! LOL

Anyway, this early in my collaging career, challenges are a great way to learn. Seeing what other people do with the same images is very inspirational. And a bit depressing cause they all seem much more creative than me. But I'm having fun, which is my goal for now, and hopefully I'll improve.