The Phoenix Rises

Hello everyone!  


Thank you so much for your fabulous response to the ArtAngel... she's very happy that you liked her, and happy isn't exactly her default setting!


I'm back with a tag today, one that rose from the ashes of pretty much nothing to become one of my favourite recent makes.


Yes, this phoenix rising out of the flames began life as a paint sample... a tag that I grabbed just to show my sister-in-law Laura, of Laurart, some of the DecoArt paints she was asking about.  
















Rather than talk about the properties of Quinacridone Gold or Transparent Red Iron Oxide, I thought the best thing would just to be to put some on some card to show them to her.  

And I added in one of the regular acrylics - grabbing, of course, my favoured Indian Turquoise - and just randomly squiggling the colours onto the tag with my fingers.

This finger-painting is what I ended up with, and we both looked at it and said, "Well, that's the start of something!".

But at that point, I had no idea what...








When I came back to it a few days later my first step, as pretty much always, was to add some Distress Ink to the mix.

As regulars will know from recent creations, one of my favourite games is to play with the contrast of opaque paints and translucent inks.  

And it's ages since I've managed to play along with the Monday Challenge at Simon Says Stamp, so I'd like to offer this contrast up to their "Got Ink?" challenge this week.










I blended on Broken China and Rusty Hinge inks at opposite ends of the tag, contrasting with the nearest paint colours. 

Obviously, I had to do a bit of spritzing and flicking too.

Next, I added the Tim Holtz sentiment - it somehow seemed right, given that my imagination was going to be the main ingredient in turning the painty scribbles into something.  

I stamped it in the Indian Turquoise paint, to make sure it would hold its own against the colours and textures of the squiggles.

More stamping next, using the same Distress Inks as I'd used for the blending.  

I started with the little Harlequin diamonds from the little Tim Holtz French Market set, in Broken China over the Broken China bits...













... and in Rusty Hinge over the Rusty Hinge bits.
















Then came the flash of inspiration - the bird from Flights of Fancy suddenly became a Phoenix rising from the flames.  

Yes, it turns out those painty squiggles are flames... obvious once you know, isn't it?!

I stamped him in Versamark ink and embossed him in Copper Kettle powder.  I added some white highlighting with Inkssentials gel pen, but I somehow knew it wasn't over yet.
















Now that I realised we were on fire, I decided to add some extra tongues of flame, licking around the edges of the card, using the flourish from the Regal Flourish clear stamp set, and then it was out with some more embossing powder.














I started with some Rust from the Antiquities range, and added a few dots of Frantage Aged Gold to it.  Once I'd melted that, I knew what had to happen to the Phoenix!











I used the Emboss It Dabber to add some more embossing ink right to the edges of his wings and tail, as well as some tiny specks feathering outward from there too. 













The Aged Gold has a fabulously lava-like look to it, and I sprinkled a couple of speckles of the Rust embossing powder onto it while still molten and remelted it in.












I'm thrilled with the results both on the Phoenix and on the edges of the card.  See how he dazzles in the sunlight!!












The topping for the tag gives me great pleasure too... 

It's some more wire rescued from notepads being thrown out - and this time it was already a fabulous brass colour (no need for the Worn Penny used for ArtAngel's ruff).











I twisted it around for a sculptural effect, and it wasn't until I was taking the photos that I realised how it echoes the flourish flames on the tag itself - I love happy accidents!











All in all, I hope this tag is a sign of my Mojo rising from the ashes of exhaustion and stress - it's felt more than a little sluggish lately.  

There were signs of it re-emerging with the ArtAngel, and this tag certainly gave me a great deal of joy combining the inks, paint and powders to release the Phoenix from my imagination.

Hope you've all been having a fabulous week, and an even better weekend!  See you soon. 







It's ages and ages since I've managed to play along with the Monday Challenge at Simon Says Stamp and Show.  
This week they'd like to know whether we've "Got Ink", so between the Distress Ink background, spritzed, flicked and stamped, and the Embossing Ink used for the Phoenix and for the lava, I hope this will fit.

And I'd also like to add it in to Anything But A Card's open challenge Fall Into Fall - apparently you don't have to have a Fall-themed project, so I'm taking them at their word, though I guess the colours here are pretty autumnal in any case!

The phoenix, hope, can wing her way through the desert skies and, still defying fortune's spite, revive from ashes and rise.
Miguel de Cervantes

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
J.G. Ballard

Can you make me a...?

I've been deploying my crafting skills, and especially my Tim Holtz Distress Inks, in a slightly different capacity over the last few days and using my craft stash for a whole new set of challenges.


Well, I say "new"... I've been roped in (mainly willingly, I admit) to my mother's dolls house hobby ever since I can remember.  You can read about her Dutch Coffee House and what it's doing here in the Czech Republic right here.  I'm just going to fill you in on a few of the tasks which fell to me in preparing it for its new life.  So this is just sneak peeks!



First up, in transporting it from the UK in the back of the car, a number of the roof tiles had come loose, broken or disappeared entirely.  They're stained wooden tiles, and there weren't any more of them, or any of the stain/paints which had originally been used.  

So I set off with my Grungeboard, some chipboard, Distress Markers, Distress Stains and Inkpads to fashion some roof tiles which wouldn't look out of place amongst the rest.  I challenge you to spot mine!  


I had to blend layers of Pumice Stone, Picket Fence and Bundled Sage to get the right shades.  And then the Distress Markers were perfect to just touch up the odd wooden tile directly on the roof.

It was also a question of colour-matching to long-lost paints when it became apparent that some extra panels were needed in the downstairs room, to balance the look of it when the house was opened up.


Thankfully, I was able to recreate the two shades of blue with just two shades of Tim Holtz Distress Ink.  First I gave the newly-cut panels of chipboard a coat of white acrylic to get a matt base coat on which the inks would ping in their true colours.  Then it was my trusty Weathered Wood for the paler panel, and several layers of Stormy Sky to get the darker centre panels.
A little stripe of gold acrylic, using my finest paintbrush, completed the look.

Rather than matching, the next challenge was all about changing colour.  Most of the furniture in the upstairs room was in a sophisticated dark wood veneer.  But two pieces didn't quite fit in: a small carved two-seater in a rather unpleasant orangey, plastic finish; and the wooden piano stool in a slightly bizarre shade of red.


Out again with the trusty paintbrushes, and a couple of quick coats of acrylic did the job.  You can see the two-seater part-way through its transformation, and the piano stool both before and after.  


What I haven't got a picture of is the foul dark yellow of the cushion of the two-seater before - genius TH - Bundled Sage and Forest Moss gave it the look of old, distressed velvet. 

Another "Can you make me a...?" request which floated up to me was for a pavement to run along in front of the shop.  


Textured cardstock, more acrylic as a base coat, and some freehand pencil lines, deeply grooved into the card gave me the starting point.  

(It's not yet stuck down properly in these pictures!)

Then I got to do fun colour work again: some Antique Linen, some Bundled Sage, some Weathered Wood applied with a Blending Tool, and then I used the Pumice Stone Distress Marker brush end, and the Black Soot fine end to create some depth in the cracks between the 'paving stones'. 
  

Because of how the house is going to lead its new life (go on, if you're curious you can find out) the outer walls needed some adornment.  


My mother wanted to use the images from this Dutch vintage-style coffee tin, so she scanned them, and then asked me whether I could make the images look like advertising hoardings which had been outside on a wall for some time. 


And so the crafting kicks in again...


First I backed them onto cardstock.

Then I started the distressing with (what else?!) some inking around the edges to give a weather-beaten look to them both.  Weathered Wood played a part, and some Walnut Stain came in to play too.  


I then gave them a coat of the Ranger Inkssentials Glue'n'Seal in Gloss to give a gentle, protective sheen.  It really changes the texture, so that you don't immediately think "ah, paper".

Finally, I tried to make it look as though the posters might be within a hoarding frame.  I edged the card with the Versamark Watermark stamp, and used UTEE as the embossing powder to get a thick enamelled ridge round the border of the images.


I really like the look of the "hoarding" against the beautiful brickwork of the dolls house.  And if you want to know how that's made, you know by now where you need to go!


The last bit of miniatures work (for the present, at any rate) was probably my favourite to do.  The "Can you make me...?" this time was founded on the need for something to go in the beautiful attic space of the house.


It's a coffee shop, so the request was for some sacks of coffee!  There were already a couple of small bags, but the loft was still cavernously empty.


A jute bag was duly relieved of its interior bottle divider - nice interlocking bits of woven sacking material, all ready to be ripped apart at the seams and altered.  I cut and shaped my bits of hessian (burlap for the Americans?) round some triangular bits of card to give them a shape when standing up.  

Then - ah, finally! - it was out with the stamps.  I wasn't sure at first whether the stamping would work as the weave of the fabric was so coarse, but a little bit of testing resolved that fear.  I used the smaller stamps from the 7 Gypsies Avignon set, which has lots of postmarks and authorisation stamps in it.  


I layered a few of them on each sack so that you'd get the impression the coffee had been in and out of a number of ports, and I had one stamp that I was imagining as the logo of the import/export company shipping them, so that one's on all of them.  Here they are stashed in the storage loft... mine are the larger ones behind. 


I'm going to leave you with a couple of old-style "Vintage Photos" because I'm suffering withdrawal: I don't think I've used any Vintage Photo Distress Ink in any of these creations! 






























So, I hope you've enjoyed this "Altered Art with a Difference", and perhaps it's given you ideas about how to use some of your stash and supplies in new ways.

A little ingenuity can go a long way... and in the world of miniatures and the world of crafting it's all up for grabs.  As one of the Tim Holtz stamps has it: The world of reality has its limits, but the world of imagination is boundless.

Set your imagination free and see where it takes you and your crafting...

Thanks for dropping by, and have a great time, scrapping or otherwise, until we meet again.

With all the Distress Inks and Markers being used, I'm entering this (or the bits of this that count!) for the Hot Shot Craft challenge which at the moment is 'Distress Inks' - perfect!

Go to Cestina's dolls houses for more on this house and many others.


A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.
Henry Ward Beecher