Sara Jane's Studio

It's That Time of Year Again!

 

There is a new catalog coming out for Stampin' Up! on July 1, and you know what that means:  retiring stamps sets and accessories.

This year, many retiring accessories are on sale for 25% to 50% off.  Check out what is still available by clicking here.  But don't wait too long- because when they are gone, they are gone.  No backorders on these items.

And there are 65 stamp sets that are retiring- including some great ones like "Heartfelt Thanks", "Hugs & Wishes", "Holidays and Wishes" and "Big, Bold Birthday".  You can download the entire list of retiring stamps by clicking here.

You can browse all retiring products by clicking here.

Don't wait too long, though.  After June 30, all of the retired items will be on their way to Florida!

Contact me with any questions, or to place an order.

 

 

My Own Watercolor Experiment

After I took Zana Clark's latest class at the Heirloom Rubber Stamp Festival in early June, of course I had to try again when I got home!  Here is one of my experiments- one that I really like the outcome!

I used the same Stamp Zia techiques, watercolors, and rubber stamps as we  did in class.  (You can see the results of those projects here and here.)  I started with the fiber paper, but this time used her "M" series colors, Magic, Moss and Moonlight.   I spray blocks of color all over, dried, the threw water drops on it, and dried, and did these two steps again.  The last layer was a spray of Glimmer Mist in "sunflower".  This gave the background a beautiful, rich, and subtle, shimmer.  The colors are rich, deep, and dark.  (Unfortunatley, the sheet alone did not photograph well with nothing to focus on.....)

Since the overall piece was fairly dark, I decided I wanted to lighten it up a bit.  So I took a large piece of cold press watercolor paper, and misted it with water to moisten the surface and allow the colors to flow.  I sprayed with Color Wash in "Ruby", Ultra Color Wash  in "Fire Opal", and a few spritzes of Neon spray in "Papaya."  When this was dry, I added some strategically placed Chroma Spray in "Lime".  When this was dry, I did the whole thing all over again, but while it was still wet, I sprinkled coarse salt all over the surface and let it air dry overnight.  After wiping off the remaining salt, I did some final spritzes of the Neon spray in "Kiwi". Those are the big drops of green on the page.

 Above:  The finished watercolored sheet, 11" X 15".

My main image was stamped using Document ink on an area of this sheet, and then highlighted with colored pencils, per Zana's technique.   It's one of her tasteful new nude figures.

Above:  Reclining nude, full image, and close-up, wtih colored pencil highlights.

I also stamped on of Stamp Zia's great bugs on the water color paper, and highlighted it with colored pencils as well.  In addition to regular Prismacolor pencils, I used a metallic lime green by Lyra on the spots of the moth wings.

Above:  Moth image, stamped on colored paper, then highlighted with colored pencils.

I had already chosen some other botanical images from the Stamp Zia catalog, and stamped those in document ink directly on the fiber paper that I had watercolored in the blues and greens.  But I chose to pull out the pink and orange from the water color paper, and colored the leaves somewhat fancifully.  Boy did I have fun!!

And I finished by attaching my reclining nude and moth images directly to the background paper.

The finished piece, above.  You can see I added a couple of strips of orange watercolor background at the top- it seemd to help balance the hot colors on the page.  I may even add a couple more touches of that background paper- maybe in the lower left corner-  as I live with the piece a bit.

I love this technique, and working on a larger format than greeting cards!  What about you?  Have you tried this?  I'd love to see your experiments with these kinds of techniques and designs, too.

Keep creating!

Another Watercolor Adventure

During my recent class with Zana Clark of Stamp Zia, I had the opportunity to experiment with a watercolor technique and her new stamp designs.  You can see the first experiment in this post.  Below is a second piece that I started and then finished at home.

I'll take you throuh this one a little differently.  This is definitely an example of overworking a piece, and then trying hard to rescue it!  What I have to remind myself is something that Zana says:  "Nothing is precious!"  Meaning, none of my art is so precious and special that I can't throw it away and start over again.  As long as I learn from my errors, I'll keep making art and growing as an artist.

Okay:  So the big mistake on this one is in the waterlily image.  I had really wanted this to be the focal point.  But I made two mistakes:  1) I was using my colored pencils on this image at night, in a poorly lit room, so I did not really have a good view of what I was achieving; and 2) I simply overworked the image.  I kept at it, and kept at it, and kept worrying over it that it became a dull mess.

Below is a close-up.  Yuck! 

 And since I knew I had ruined this image, I experimented with what would happen if I took bleach to it to remove the watercolor background.  The oval in in the lower left shows the effect of bleaching out the color.  However, you can see that I pretty much ruined the black stamped image, adn that the colors just got muddy and unpleasant.  I also found that this particular fiber paper will break down if you keep at it too much with pencil, particularly if you have a nice sharp point.

So what did I do?  I stamped the same waterlily image on white cardstock, and had fun with my colored pencils and a Prisma blending pencil to color it in.  Below is a close-up of the result:  nice and clear image, with pretty decent shading of color.  Much better than above, don't you think?

Since this crisp image now jumped off the page, I tried bleaching both the buddha and the small, round flower medallion.  Below is a shot from the back, showing the bleached areas.

And here is the Buddha image, from the front, after coloring with colored pencils, and bleaching out the background color.  Not too bad- You may think an odd choice of colors, but I did it to bring in the color from the background in other parts of the piece, to keep the eye moving, and to attempt to balance the colors.

Finally, the whole piece is shown below, with the cleaned up waterlily image.

I kind of like it- but not as well as the image with the nude, that I shared earlier. 

So, I am going to keep experimenting, and keep sharing the results!  Check back for more!

 

Watercoloring with Stamp Zia

The Heirloom Rubber Stamp Festival was held in West Springfield, MA, the weekend of June 6-7.  As usual for me, I attended the class offered by Zana Clark of Stamp Zia.  Zana develops wonderful, brilliant watercolors in spray bottles, and then fantastic techniques to use them.  She also designs her own unmounted rubber stamps, and has a new release every year.  So I am always anxious to take her class each year, and see what new things she has come up with.

Above is one of the pieces that I completed during Zana's two hour class period- the finished piece is about 8-1/2" X 11", and suitable for framing, if I do say so myself!  I don't have pictures of the work-in-progress, but I have been playing with the technique at home, and will share those experiments over the next week here in my blog.  We used the spray watercolors, rubber stamps, and colored pencils to achieve these very cool results.

The first step is to take some of Stamp Zia's Fiber paper (which is a little like Tyvek, but is not Tyvek) and crumple it up in your hand.   After smoothing it out, you spray generously with your choice of colors, in any pattern you like.  And then dry COMPLETELY- if you are impatient (like most of us!) your embossing gun will do the trick in about 5 minutes, depending on how wet your paper got during spraying.  It needs to be completely dry for the next step to give the right effect.  That step?  Dip your fingers into some clean water, and flick them at your paper.  The drops will spread where they fall, moving the watercolor with them into wonderful patterns of color and shape.  This is the mottling that you see in the background in the piece above.

Next step:  dry, dry, dry!!  Then, you can do another layer of color, dry, and anther round of splattering with water- and dry.   It creates a rich, layered background for your next steps.

Once you are happy with the background, it is time to start stamping.  Zana is a big fan of Document Ink by Stewart Superior; it is a solvent based ink, and like India Ink or StazOn, is not water soluble.  However, your piece must be COMPLETELY dry (again!) before you start stamping, or the residual water will act almost like a resist and prevent a stamping a good image.

All of the stamps used here are from Stamp Zia.  I started with a large background image of an architectural column- and my paper was not sufficiently dry, so I did not get a good image.  SO, I simply stamped the naked lady right on top of it!  And liked the effect!  So I kept going.  I added the moths, and repeated the symbol three times across the bottom.  At this point, unlike me, I decided less was more, and quit stamping, to move onto the next step:  coloring with Prismacolor pencils.

Above is a close up of the female figure, stamped on top of the architectural column, and then colored with colored pencils.  Yes, I did choose lime green and turquoise for the nude, but it works!  You might notice some actual white in the nude figure.  When I got home, I decided that she did not pop-out of the page as much as I would have liked, so I very carefully painted on some bleach from a bleaching pen to the back side of the figure.  (I held it up to the light so I could see the stamped outline.)  You may also notice a couple of very white spots on the page:  I got a little messy with the bleach.  I think I can fix these with a little colored pencil, however.

Above is a close-up of one of the moths.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE doing this kind of "art stamping"!  If you have any interest, and live in the mid-west, watch for classes by Zana Clark of Stamp Zia.  She also has a couple of video tutorials on her website.  AND of course, I'd love to teach you how, myself! 

Keep creating!

Another Polymer Clay Project

This is the final project that resulted from my recent play-time with the Clearsnap StamPress.  (You can see my review of the StamPress itself by clicking here.)  My other projects were a decorative box, a trinket box, and a not-so-successful box.

 The inspiration for this piece was the polymer clay panel in the center- it was the result of impressing polymer clay with a stamping wheel by Paula Best, using the StamPress.  The center of the panel had four line sketches of faces, but I cut those out with my Xacto knife after baking, so the panel was more like a frame.  It was an interesting exercise to color the piece- it started out as plain white poly clay.  First I tried black acrylic paint- but, yuck!  While it got into the grooves well, the rest of the surface looked a dull grey.  So I wiped that off as best I could, and then tried wiping with a magenta acrylic paint.  Better.  But it needed something a bit more- so I used my finger to "dry brush" on some Lumiere True Gold acrylic from Jacquard.  NOW I was getting somwhere.  The little flower on the right needed something to set it apart, so I painted in just a touch of green in the stem and leaves, and then made certain that there was gold on the raised areas.

The container is a small shadow box from C&T Publishing, and I decided at the end not to use the cover.  In retrospect I realized that I could have also used a small square jewelry box (like the kind that you get new jewelry in).  I covered it with Rose Red Designer Prints paper from Stampin' Up!  Then I filled it with three layers of 3/8" thick foam core- because I wanted my panel to be more forward in the box, rather than all the way at the back.  The top layer of foam core I covered with a Kiwi Kiss Designer Prints paper (also from SU).  The polymer clay panel was attached with OmniStick Glue (like E6000). 

The flower in the center was made from layering three flowers from Maya Road.  They aren't felt and they aren't paper- more like a flocked surface.  A decorative brad is holding them together, and the whole was attached in the center of the frame using OmniStick.

Then came the rest of the embellishments:  a 1/8" polka dot satin ribbon and a fine gold cord were glued to the edges of the back.  Two small pieces of gold paper charms (tiny strings of flowers) are centered above and below the poly clay frame.   Pearl "Dew Drops" are in each corner, and I added tiny red hearts from my stash to each corner of the frame.

All-in-all, it was really fun to work on.  Of course my young 15 year-old friend, Aaron, asked the classic male question:  "What's it for?!?"  Fortunately his sister knew the answer, and I know that you do too!

Keep creating!

 

Not my proudest project

I am not in the habit of sharing the projects that I am not happy with, or just plain don't like, or that I, ummm, make mistakes on.  But then I thought, I learn from those projects, so why not share the whole process?

I was playing around with my StampPress from Clearsnap and impressing polymer clay.  I decided to try to form a strip of clay around a paper mache box and bake it.

I mixed up a green polymer clay with a hint of blue, conditioned it on my clay-only pasta machine and ran it through the StamPress using a standard size wheel from Stampin Up! ("Forever Flowers").

The polyclay tray (shown here holding the green clay) that comes with the StamPress is only about 8" long, so I had to make two strips to cover the side of a 4" diameter paper mache box.

I used the remnant of the second strip to decorate the top of the box.

I attached the strip to the unfinished paper mache box using a liquid poly clay, and baked at 275 degrees for 15 minutes (my polyclay was only 1/8" thick).   This part of the experiment was a success:  the strip was adhered to the box, and the box did not burn.

Then, I used a combination of my finger and cotton swabs to highlight the images on the cured polyclay using powdered mica pigments.  And I wish I had stopped here!  But no, I had to go on and apply a liquid gloss finish (like Crystal Effects, but made for poly clay) to the polymer clay.  MISTAKE!  The liquid gloss ended up solubilizing the dry pigment and making it flow.  DOH!!!  So where I had originally had a pretty dense application of color, I found that I now had a muddied, less intense look.  You can probably see this better by clicking on the image, below, to enlarge it.

In my attempt to salvage something, I kept going with paint and stamping.... I started by edging the polyclay strips with my trusty Krylon gold leafing pen.

Then, I painted the sides of the box above the polymer clay strip and the top of the box with Jacquard Lumiere Bright Gold.  The sides of the lid were painted with Halo Blue Gold- which turned out to be a pretty good match for the polymer clay color!  (At least ONE thing worked out!!)

But then the gold lid seemd too overwhelming, so I stamped a small background image from Stampin' Up! (Boho Backgrounds) using Handsome Hunter Craft ink.  I carried this image down the sides of the lid as well.

And that's it.  A just okay final product- but a pretty good learning experience.