To walk beside you

I AM FURIOUS AND DEEPLY UNHAPPY.  I HATE NEW BLOGGER.  I CAN NO LONGER DESIGN MY BLOGPOST AS I WANT TO.  I CANNOT PLACE THE PHOTOS WHERE I WANT THEM.   AND IT TAKES FOUR TIMES AS LONG EVEN TO GET THEM TO WHERE I DON'T WANT THEM.  BUT I NO LONGER HAVE A CHOICE TO REVERT TO LEGACY SO THE BLOGPOSTS ARE NOW NOT AS I WANT THEM TO LOOK.   THE LAYOUT IS RUINED.  NEW BLOGGER IS EVIDENTLY NOT FOR CREATIVE PEOPLE.  I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG I WILL PERSEVERE WITH A PLATFORM WHERE THE "IMPROVEMENTS" ARE MAKING MY LIFE HARDER.

Hello all!  I'm very behind on sharing tags with you here on the blog.  I've had a sudden rush of creative mojo while I've been here in the Czech Republic checking on the building work.  But now I'm heading back to (quarantine in) the UK to start packing up my stuff for the permanent move.  

So there might not be too much going on creatively in the next while - I'm not sure how I'm going to juggle it all.  But I've got plenty stored up to share - it's just a question of finding time to blog it all - so I'm back with a favourite trio today.  I notice I can no longer revert to Legacy Blogger, so this post may never see the light of day at all!  (No longer amused, as you'll see by the prologue at the top of the blog.)

These backgrounds are a combination of Distress Inks and Oxides smooshed on the craft mat - but the key ingredient (and the key element in my reawakenedmojo) is the addition of Speckled Egg to my favourite colour palettes.

It's a glorious colour by itself - veering from delicate blue tones to soft greens depending on context - but the joy for me has been in finding how it plays with the other colours I adore.  So there is Vintage Photo here, and some Rusty Hinge.  There's Stormy Sky and Wilted Violet.  And there had to be Pumice Stone too.

The tangled branches stamped to create the undergrowth are a Penny Black image.

And there's a Wendy Vecchi vintage text background embossed in white to echo the book page fragments behind the Paper Dolls.

I was feeling the lack of die-cutting ability, given I had only my travelling stash to work with... but the solution was these twig trees.

They were a fortuitous by-product of a weekend of hard work cutting, chopping and clearing overgrown plants and trees in the garden.

I wasn't doing it all by myself - a lovely young Czech friend came and spent one of his last weekends before starting his architecture degree doing most of the work... I was merely an assistant.  I think he thought I was a bit mad when I started hauling branches back out of the carload headed for the greenery skip which bobs up around the village at this time of year.  I now have a lovely collection of branches large and small to get creative with once I'm settled back here.

The Paper Dolls almost chose themselves.  The little guy in the hat is a constant favourite of mine - I could do with twice as many of him in each pack in every size!

And the toddler has also put in many an appearance on various tags and ATCs over time here at Words and Pictures.  He's carefully holding on to one of the branches to help with his balance.

I do like the seated girl too.  In fact, I glued on an extra branch for her to rest on.

The words are from Tim's Clippings stickers... found text without going to the trouble of finding it.

  

It's funny how, as you flick through the pages, the phrases you need just seem to appear.

You have to peer between the twiggy branches to catch all the words, which makes for a nice active engagement with the tags.

No need for anything fancy at the top - some simple fine twine finishes things off.

I hope you like them as much as I do.  And I hope you'll bear with me over the next few months.  It's been a busy six weeks dealing with builders and searching for flooring/showers etc where the chosen ones from 2018 were no longer available.  And it's going to be worse as I pack away my life's belongings and ship them across Europe.  

But sooner or later I'll be back in action properly... though maybe not on Blogger given New Blogger, which makes me desperately sad.  I'll have enough on my hands working out how life works in a new country, with a difficult language, and building new income streams given the theatre work is on hold for the foreseeable future, without struggling to deal with a platform which has been "improved" to make my life harder.

But looking on the bright side, it's a beautiful place I'm moving to.  I'm sharing some photos of South Bohemia on Instagram, so you can take a look if you would like to here... @b0hem1anh0me

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Take good care of yourselves as the second wave takes hold.  Stay safe, stay well, and stay creative.

I want to cultivate the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.

Käthe Kollwitz

The Wonder of Trees - or Etched Branches II

Hello all!  After a crazy week opening Romeo and Juliet - which, thankfully, is going down extremely well - I'm back with the promised second nature spread using the Etched Branches stamp by Penny Black.  As you'll see, I also took the chance to play with my new Tim Holtz Birch stencil.

It's another fairly simple page but, like What You Love or Etched Branches I, it gives me great pleasure.  And after visiting the summer meadow we're now definitely moving into an autumnal forest.  I actually made both pages at the same time - but clearly I was travelling through seasons that day!

I started by blending Chipped Sapphire, Stormy Sky and Weathered Wood inks through the stencil. 














I did a bit of spritzing and flicking for extra texture.















Next I stamped the branches in Archival ink and blended on some more ink to give the impression of further tangles of brambles around the foot of the trees.

I already rather liked it at that stage, but I decided I would have a play with my watercolour paints to add some more detail to the tree trunks.

You can see the early stages on the right hand page here.














I used my Pentel water brushes which have very fine tips, so it's possible to work in great detail...














... as well as to add soft washes of shaded colour.

I love trees - they have such beauty and wisdom and serenity - and birch trees are right up there near the top of my favourites.









I love the dimension it's possible to give the trees, and the whole process was very calming... a soothing way to while away a couple of hours in the midst of a pretty stressful work schedule.

I left it at that for a few days, before deciding that I would add just a few words to the pictures.  After all, I need to live up to the name of my blog, don't I?!

Small Talk stickers to the rescue again...

Once I'd stuck the phrases down, I used the water brushes again to add extra shading between the tree trunks around the words with Chipped Sapphire lifted direct from the mini ink pad.







So there's my autumn forest for you.  I hope you've enjoyed wandering amongst the trees with me today.  I have managed to transfer some photos from my phone to my laptop, so I hope to be back soon with some pictures of the R&J set for you.  Have a lovely Sunday everybody!

Well, one can't get over the habit of being a little girl all at once.... I'm sure I'll always feel like a child in the woods. These walks home from school are almost the only time I have for dreaming.... Here in the woods I like best to imagine quite different things…I'm a dryad living in an old pine, or a little brown wood-elf hiding under a crinkled leaf. That white birch you caught me kissing is a sister of mine. The only difference is, she's a tree and I'm a girl, but that's no real difference.

From Anne of Avonlea by L.M.Montgomery

I'd like to play along at Anything But Cute where they have An Autumn Day as their theme
And at Stamps and Stencils there's a wonderful Elements of Nature theme this month

What you love... or Etched Branches I

Hello all!  I'm here with the first of a couple of nature pages in my small journalling book (see Away She Went... for the details if you want them).   Both spreads use the Etched Branches stamp by Penny Black, but I think you get a quite different look in each one.  We're enjoying an Indian Summer here in Columbus, Ohio, so here's probably the last of the summery meadows for this year...  (The set of pages still to come is definitely heading for autumn!)

It's a simple page, but it's very much in tune with the words.  I'm still working on it being okay that I tend towards similar themes and colour palettes very often, not to mention favourite techniques and products... the things which make me happy when I'm creating.

I hope that it's not about being repetitive, but about recognising what feels like "me" when I make something.  I hope that it's about expressing something inside me which wants to come out in those ideas and colours.

I know quite well that this year, when I've had relatively little time for crafting (and usually on the move, as you all know), I'm even more inclined to use the time I have in ways which make me happy rather than trying to push myself in other directions.








In any case, here we are amidst the wild meadow grasses again... 

There are some delicate Distress Inks in the background, spritzed with water for soft texture.  I think it's mainly Old Paper, Weathered Wood and Antique Linen.












The Etched Branches are stamped in Olive Archival...

(It's all looking rather bleak and wintry at the moment, but things are about to change with some more inking around the edges.)












... as is the Cow Parsley (or Queen Anne's Lace if you prefer the posher version!) from Tim Holtz's Wildflower set.

I used a white pen to add detail to the flower heads as well, of course, as some white paint spatter to add the impression of a summer's day with pollen and haze in the air (better enjoyed on the journalling page than in real life if you're a hayfever sufferer as I have been for much of my life).











The words are from one of my Donna Downey sets by Unity.  I brought a grab bag of them with me, so I'm not sure which particular set these are from.

Simple pages, but they make my heart happy.  I hope they do the same for you.






There'll be some more seasonal nature pages along soon, and if I can get my devices to cooperate with one another I hope to share some pictures of the beautiful set we have for my production of Romeo and Juliet.  Talk about favourite things... watch out for crackle and splatter on a huge scale!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I'll see you again soon.



Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odourless but all together perfume the air.
Georges Bernanos

In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
Jonas Mekas

Dawn Chorus

Hello all... After a quiet start to the month, it's hotting up around here now.  I was over at PaperArtsy last night (I hope you'll check out my Word Tags if you missed them), and today it's a Magpie Day of inspiration over at Country View Challenges.  I wasn't able to be part of the main Simply Scenic inspiration this month, so I'm really happy that I was able to squeeze in a scenic postcard for this.

I've kept it simple with some of my favourite Distress Ink colours and various stamps combined to create a dawn chorus scene.  Did anybody catch the marvellous "slow season" on BBC4?  There was a two hour canal trip, glass-blowing, furniture making and an hour of the dawn chorus - all without soundtrack or voiceover - magical!





Well, this postcard probably qualifies for a similar world of simplicity... some ink, some stamps and some water.

I blended Faded Jeans, Rusty Hinge and Vintage Photo Distress Inks on to a textured postcard, and spritzed water at them with my new T.H. water spray bottle... Yes, I know, I gave in, but looking at this I'm already glad that I did!












The tree silhouettes are formed by the two halves of a Penny Black stamp (used in one of my favourite journalling pages from earlier this year).  It's actually a narrow avenue of trees, but by inking up one half at a time you can have the trees as far apart as you need them!











Along the ground in between I used one of the PaperArtsy Hot Picks birds & grasses images, stamped in a combination of Jet Black Archival and Rusty Hinge, just to get a slightly burnished tone of early morning sunshine on the birds.










The "Postcard" at the top is a Darkroom Door stamp, and I drew the dividing line with a PITT pen.













Another Darkroom Door stamp provides the writing on the postcard, stamped in Faded Jeans so that it would fade into the background.













The words from the Small Talk sticker set seemed about perfect for the theme, and I added shading around them, first of all with Inktense pencils, and then with Faded Jeans and Rusty Hinge Distress Stains, applied with a water brush.








I liked the effect so much I repeated it around the edges of the card to give a bit of extra texture.  So now there are splatters of removed ink and splatters of extra ink.

I thought that was that... but then it occurred to me that I maybe wanted to preserve the colours a bit.  Don't get me wrong, I adore Distress Inks, but over time the colours can fade a little if they're out on display.




So I decided to clear emboss the whole thing.  I tapped the Versamark ink pad all over the postcard and applied the powder, and I love the result.  Not only are the colours more vivid (because of light getting refracted and so intensifying the colour spectrum - or something like that!), but there's a delicious enamelled texture to it.

And of course it catches the light which, as you know, I love as an effect.  Most of the photos in this post are of the plain ink version... just the first and the last photos give you the embossed effect.

So there's my Simply Scenic postcard for you.  I hope you'll hop over to Country View Challenges to check out the Magpie inspiration from the rest of my fabulous team-mates, and I'll see you again soon.

Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.
René Daumal

I'd like to enter this in the Vintage Garden theme over at the new Anything But Cute Challenge.  I hope with the inks, pencils, staining and embossing it's mixed media enough to qualify!
And at A Sprinkle of Imagination it's an Anything Goes theme, as long as you use at least one product available in the store - the Distress Inks and Stains are all there.