BYOB Paint Classes and First Official Consignment Deal!!

You guys have heard of Groupon, yeah? (If not, it's a service that works with businesses to offer discount buys of services/goods that basically help businesses get noticed or get some easy business to try and retain long-term customers. They provide emails and have deals not just for your city, state but also for vacation trips and more! It's pretty awesome.) Well, my friend got a couple of classes scheduled through Groupon to a BYOB Paint class at a place called Easely Amused here in Austin, TX. If any of you can, I highly suggest making it out to one of their classes sometime. They've only been open for 2 months, but the owner Bridget, is FANTASTIC!! She makes the classes so much fun with little stories, jokes and just her love of what she does!

For these classes, you are allowed to BringYourOwnBeverage (see beer or wine, etc ;) ), you pay the $30-$40 (depending on size) for the art piece you want, and you are provided all the supplies from the canvas to the brushes to the paints. Once the class is over, you get to go home with your very own piece of art that YOU painted. It doesn't matter your skill level when you go, it will turn out however you want it to. The awesome thing is to see the variety that comes out of the same class, with the same instructor and all the different choices people make and ways they paint.

This is pretty much what you start off with: a blank canvas, a plate full of paint colors, water cup for your brushes and whatever brushes deemed necessary by Bridget you'll need for the picture and of course, my choice of beverage for the night was a bottle of Cabernet Savignon.. yummmm!

This is after a few steps of a blue wash on the top 3rd of the canvas, kiwi green on the middle and a darker green on the bottom of the canvas. Then layers of dots from a pumpkin red all over, to a red on the bottom half and a bright orange on the top half.

Here we have Airon deep in thought as she's adding the leaves on her trees.

This is my finished piece, with a few more layers of leaves added on (including some dark reddish brown leaves in the bottom right corner of the foliage) and tree trunks, nice and whispy!!

Airon's showcasing her awesome finished piece! She added the extra white stripes near the trunks in the grassy area and a few holes in the leaves along with adding a pretty cute bird's nest with some robins!!

After the class, I got curious if I could re-create this picture again. Only, I didn't want to do a full-size so I grabbed a 2"x3" miniature canvas from my stock and.....

What do you guys think?? Pretty similar, eh?! Painting in miniature is pretty challenging! I maybe could have added more layers of leaves, but I like the way it looks now!

The next picture we did (we had 2 Groupon sessions) was poppies!! This is the first few steps done:

We did about 5 yellow dots anywhere on the canvas to place our poppies, then made red sort of flower bodies around them. Then we did a light blue wash down the middle and dark blue on the outsides.

Then we did another round of the blue washes to make them darker. This is Airon's (she wanted more than 5 :) :

This one is mine:

The next few steps were to darken and texturize the poppies, add some dark brown and black scribbles in the centers, leaving however much of the yellow we wanted, and then add some lavender and pink to the meeting ground of light and dark blues and added kiwi green stems.

I added a little more texture to the flowers and was done with mine:

Airon added a few more details and stems and such to hers and here is her final piece!!:

All in all, I'd say these classes, if you have a studio near you, are a MUST!!!! If you happen to be in the Austin, TX area, you can find Easely Amused here. You can also take a look through the picture gallery to see the variance of these pieces people have painted!

 It was such an awesome experience, both times and even though it was the same studio and same instructor, the experiences were still different!! It's also pretty awesome to see all the variations on final pieces with the same instructions!!

Now to the more exciting part!!

I showed Bridget about 10-12 pieces of my jewelry and the pink and brown flowered gathered clutch I showed you guys the other day.... SHE LOVED IT ALL!!! She's giving me a whole shelf on a bookshelf that is in her lobby with the backside facing a full wall WINDOW to the outside/street!! I am so excited about this opportunity for consignment and look forward to working with Bridget on this first time endeavor for my business and hobby!!

Now I just have to price everything, make more clutches, figure out displays, layout on the shelf, etc.....

SO EXCITED!!!! I can't wait to setup my shelf and don't worry, I will definitely show you guys what I come up with!

Craft ya laters!!

Painted and Mod Podged Work Tray - Pt 1

I keep not wanting to work in my craft room on projects and opt instead to work in the living room, on the coffee table, so that I can watch tv, eat and spend time with my bf. This unfortunately sometimes results in my projects perhaps spending much more time than they should out and making a mess.

My solution? I'm going to get one of those trays with handles that I can just put my things in and pick up easy enough to take to my room to put away! Except I don't like spending $20-$30 on one when it might possibly get mussed up by my projects on occasion.... Solution!

I went to my local Hobby Lobby and got one of these bad boys for $3.49!! What a bargain!!

I went ahead and painted the whole thing using a mixture of a brick red, pumpkin orange and gold squirted on the wood, and mixed as I was painting with my sponge brush:

I already had some scrapbooking paper on hand (which is actually why I chose the colors I did, otherwise, it would have been blue ;) ) and used about 3 layers of mod podge on the paper, and 2 on the rest of the tray. 

You like the paper?? The sides of the tray aren't too rough with the multiple layers of mod podge as i lightly sanded in between layers.

The one thing I did very poorly though was to not actually measure the dimensions of the tray and paper; I free-handed the fitting and cutting process and the result?
 

Yeah, there was a gap... :( The best I could do at the time was put another piece of paper underneath the main one to sort of hide, but I'm not too happy with the way this looks so I will be trying to come up with a way to hide that before finishing this tray... I will be mixing a 3rd medium into this baby!! Check back later!!

Craft ya laters!!

Monthly All Girls Craft Group - March 2013

March was much more productive for all that showed, even me!! w00t!!

Airon didn't have to work on a paper (Yay!!) and after looking up a little last minute advice on best way to do it..

She was able to finally get her project finished she'd been dreaming about for a few months!!

Inspiration came from the lovely and talented Kristi Linauer at Addicted2Decorating.com only, in a much smaller scale than what she presented in her post.


Leena worked on a necklace:

 

As well as a very cute baby announcement/card for a friend:

After some discussion and brainstorming about supplies for other projects...

 And some playing with one of the pet attendants...

I was able to make some necklaces!!

As well as one that we mocked from a necklace Michelle had already and modeled by the lovely "Airon's neck"...

Michelle was working on a necklace for her soon-to-be sister-in-law:

Which was pretty enough as it was, then she had to top herself and make more for the bride and bridesmaids to choose from!!

All in all, this craft day was pretty good in terms of projects worked on/finished but again, was just great to see the gals and have a little wine and gossip!!

Craft ya laters!!

ACEO Art Trading Cards

Previously on Artfire: Published On: 07-25-2012

My friend at work recently got me into ACEO Art Trading Cards. I think they're a neat way to do sampling as well as sharing and collecting of artists work! Therefore, I have gone ahead and created 2 using first my pastel pencils and then my oil pastels with a woodblock stamp of trees in black acrylic paint on the foreground and added glitter to the pastel pencil one.

Here they are:




I think I'll actually try to make a whole set of these to see what variations I can get, but only 1 of each exact coloration and design!!

Anyone have any specific color/pattern requests for these?

New ideas, new upcoming projects, new inspiration!!

Previously on Artfire: Published On: 06-29-2012

So I've been gone for a bit because I was working 2 jobs, but I quit that one about a couple months ago and since then, have just basically been settling in to the new house we moved in to in March, but also have been incredibly busy at the day job! Thankfully however, we have internet access and in my minutes here and there, I have found inspiration to start crafting again and MAKE the time at home to do stuff!!

I have started a pinterest account and through this, I have found lots of awesome ideas, and I continue to find awesome things each time I go on, but have also posted a lot of ideas for things I would like to try and have even tried a few already!!

Here are a few of the things I've come up with and will be aiding in my immediate future projects/items. Please forgive the poor photo quality, I have had issues with my digital camera capturing the colors just right and/or have used my camera phone just to get these up for you guys:


These are done with shades of purple in an ombre-style painting, then stenciled on the black rose, first one has silver paint to accent (I accidentally used a little too much black paint and it seeped under the edges of the stencil, honest 1st-time type of mistake) so for the second one, I didn't use as much paint and then just sprinkled a little purple glitter over in a few spots and it was much better!
 
This one I painted a 2-tone background, a wooden table with a pink tablecloth draped on it at an angle and a blue pearly vase and attached silk flowers to look like a flower vase on the hall table perhaps.

This one was just the blue pearly background (love this color!!), brown tree branch painted on and then the white silk flowers were glued on to look like a cherry blossom tree in full bloom on a beautiful spring morning!

For this one, I painted thick stripes of red and a dark orange as the background, if I'd had a stencil I would have used it but unfortunately for the leaves, I cut these out by hand out of card-stock and then laid it down and sponged around with the gold to have the imprint show of the background.

All the canvases above were painted using acrylic paint and 3"x3" canvases and then sprayed with a gloss varnish-type spray to seal in the paint and to give the awesome extra gloss look.

Yes, believe it or not, these are all only 3"x3" canvases!! I have gotten 24 of these little guys and am having a blast with testing out techniques on them!! This has been a good way to make sure that before I get to a larger, more permanent canvas, I am less likely to make a big mistake and if I do make one, it'll be less severe just as I have a basic idea of what to do.

You should be able to find the blank canvases in a 6-pack at Hobby Lobby for about US $5.00; I haven't found an online supplier yet as I was really anxious to get these the day I wanted to play!!

Next I will post a couple of resin pieces/projects I've done/am working on!!

Butterfly Paint Chip Art

I know there's dozens of versions of paint chip art out there, but it is pretty easy, cheap and can be made into so many different kinds of art! You can just cut random shapes out or you could use craft punches to make uniform shapes and arrange them into your art of choice. I decided to do a few pieces and have finished 2 so far that I will show you today.

**Disclaimer - My pictures are of poor quality, I know... I wasn't sure where my camera was so you'll have to suffer through my phone's camera pictures. Also, I've found it's pretty darn hard to get purples photographed either way and think this time it wasn't so bad!**

My boss loves purple. I'm not so sure about butterflies, that's probably more me than her, but I decided to give it a go to make a piece and see if she likes it. So I grabbed a bunch of different color purple paint chip samples:

 I went ahead and started cutting out the strips to use for my craft punches:

My awesome little tiny butterfly punch! It had a catch-all lid on the bottom, but I removed it as it was an easy hinge and would keep flopping down and couldn't hold more than 3 or 4 butterflies without them trying to get stuck in the punch's body itself!!

On the far right is my awesome 3-in-1 butterfly punch I got with a coupon. It can cut a basic butterfly, a butterfly with just the dots along the wings, and lastly, it can do butterflies with the dots and the inner wings cut-out. Love this punch!! It is pretty messy though, but very easy to switch between butterfly punch choices, to actually punch and of course, both punches are easy-lock shut.

I wasn't using regular canvases as I only have a few and just wanted to make a few smaller pieces that are easier to put up on our desk cube walls. I used a flat canvas that's about 8 1/2" x 11" that I had 2 3-packs of. So far, that means no cost as the paint chips were free, already had the canvases, the punches and the paint to paint the canvas silver:

Nothing too special...

The thing that I don't really see in many posts where other people are doing this paint chip art is how freaking hard it is to get the design you're wanting juuuuuust right! I had a heck of a time deciding exactly how to do this since I didn't want to cover the whole canvas!

Arrangement one...

Arrangement two....

Arrangement three....

Needless to say, I tried a few different ways to put these things on here and was bothering my bff as she was hanging out with some schoolmates at a bar by texting her the various arrangements for her opinion. After sending her these 3 and maybe a couple more options, we settled on:

Her suggestion was to make them look more funneled from the bottom left corner to the top right. I was happy with this one and so I went ahead and glued them down. I used just a liquid glue stick thingie (my school glue sticks were apparently so old, they were dried out and looked like worms in their tubes... worms that didn't want to do anything but roll over and die :( I was sad...)

But there you have it!! What do you guys think?! I painted a second canvas with leftover silver paint since I realized I squeezed way too much on the first canvas, so there's a possibility of doing another one of these, especially since as soon as I was done and stood up, I spotted another butterfly punch I completely forgot I had (I've had it for about 10 years!) and it's a middle size between these two, just plain solid butterfly punch... I might try to do another version of this piece, maybe with the butterflies coming from middle bottom and splitting off to the sides? Lemme think on it and get back to ya'll.....

Also, wanted to share another piece I did as well in a similar fashion, only larger so that it's 16" x 24" or so:

I know, the other projects mostly cover a canvas as opposed to the whole thing, but I got a little cut-happy and made so many petals that I didn't want to NOT use them! And besides, I like it! :) That's all that matters, right? This one, I glued the pieces down, but then covered in a few layers of mod podge just to make sure none come up. I'm tempted to seal in resin later, and if I do, I will show you guys better pictures for one, and second, will show you guys the before and after!!

Til next time...........