Chunky Art Book - # 8 - butterfly

Wax resist and watercolour paper for background, embossed strip, punchie flower garden, coloured clear butterfly accent and a colour printed word!! Added a doodled border on this one too!! The transparent coloured butterfly was created in the same art session as the embossed metal ones and coloured with the same paint. A cute butterfly charm for this page. Added details to the flowers with black Sharpie marker. Butterfly mounted with 3D foam tape below its body which was coloured with a large Sharpie marker.

Therese

Chunky Art Book - # 7 - Life

A music sheet stained with walnut ink as background, colour printed images of a window (stash) and door (mine) layered onto black, deckled edged strip, handwritten quote with highlighted letters and 3D punchie embellishment with a tag. I added a doodled border to this page as well.
I have a large collection of door images!!

Therese

Chunky Art Book - # 6 - pouffy flower

Colour washed decorative paper for the background, a pouffy flower with leaves and strips, doodled border, a quote and flower confetti embellishment. The flower charm goes really well with this page. We created these pouffy flowers in one of our art sessions. Eight scallop punchies of colourful tissue paper layered and stapled onto a green cardstock scallop. Starting with the first one - each scallop is tightly scrunched to the middle. Add the leaves (cut from a SU five petal punchie) and fluff the petals - a cute little flower accent. The quote is another of my favorites - one of my own creations!!

Therese

Chunky Art Book - # 5 - leaf

An alcohol ink background paper with doodled trees and birds, layered cardstock strip borders with doodled edges, watercoloured colour printed tag with quote and leaf charm layered on gold and black cardstock mounted with 3Dfoam tape!
The colour printing bled a little with the watercolour but in the end I really liked the effect. I added a bit of blue watercolour to the background paper to help it blend with the quote.
You can see the heart charm better on this page.

Therese

Chunky Art Book - # 4 - glittered heart

A colour washed decorative paper in red tones, a Mary Engelbreit small calendar image with a doodled frame, a black decorative strip border embellished with white gel marker, a doodled accent strip and a red glittered heart mounted to a black square mounted to the page with 3D foam tape. This page features a red heart charm as well.

Therese

Chunky Art Book - # 3 - angels

A colour washed background paper in black tones, a laser printed angel image layered onto red paste paper, embellished strips and a cute little tag with the angel quote and paper ribbon!! I added a doodled border all the way around with a black fine tipped Sharpie. The charm features a quote about art which is one of my favorites and is attached with some loopy fiber!

Therese

Chunky Art Book - # 2 - cultivate compassion

The background paper was one where white paint was added to a colour washed paper. The page features a metal embossed flower with a little red heart lady bug, a strip of layered cardstocks with a heart punchie and an embellished gold embossed quote. The embossed metal sunflower is mounted with 3D foam tape to keep it dimensional. I added dotted swirls with a Sharpie to just finish off the page once all the elements had been adhered.
One of our art sessions was spent creating embossed metal accents. I provided pieces of foil (the weight of pie plates) and they used pencils to emboss a design in the surface using folded newspaper for padding. Once finished, they were painted with "acrylic paint" using q-tips and left to dry over the weekend. I created the "paint" using acrylic finish and stamp pad reinkers - worked very much like those sold for painting suncatchers. I like using quotes and words in my layouts. Some of the students featured quotes on their pages - others used a combination of papers and elements to create their layouts.

Therese

Chunky Art Book - cover

My cover features a flowery decorative paper I created with the wax resist technique using an embossed plastic placemat and watercolour. I enhanced the paper with more watercolour after I glued it to my front cover. It defined the flower and added colour to the center and leaves. I added a simple cardstock ribbon to the front choosing to feature the decorative paper!! The charm I added to the front includes the date for future reference and is tied on with multi colour fiber.

Therese

My Chunky Art Book

I will now share with you my Chunky Art Book!!
I created it as an example for the students. Mine has 7 double sided pages - I reduced theirs to 5 pages. Once I started creating pages I realized they would not have the time to get all the pages done.
I used the same supplies for my book as I had provided the students to keep my creation within the realm of the possibilities that they had available to them. I found the challenge of limited supplies generally required more creativity to produce the sort of layouts I am used to. A very good exercise for me.

Therese

Creating a page

I am sure you can all relate to the little bit of space there is left on your work surface once you start creating! Here I am creating a page for my Chunky Art Book in about 6" square with a table full of "stuff" to choose from!!
It was a very fun project!!
I provided the students with a copius amount of papers, images, accents, embellishments, words and letters to augment the ones they had created in previous classes as they started creating their books. First of all, we glued decorative paper to both sides of the pages being sure not to cover the holes. All the pages were pressed for a weekend to give a nice flat surface. We coloured the spine and edges with black marker to give them a nice finished look. Then, the process of creation began!! Choosing elements, designing a layout, adding, rejecting pieces until both covers seemed finished. Gluing everything into place and making changes on the fly!! A reminder to organize pages and keep them all upright and properly aligned with each other was heeded by most. It took several days for the pages to be finished and even then, last minute items were added to finish them off!! We added the bindings and the Chunky art books were a reality. Once the pages were done we had a session of playing with shrink plastic to make the charms they would be using to decorate the spine of their chunky books!!
They were provided with blanks of Rough and Ready shrink plastic about 1.5"x 2" and reminded that the charms would shrink by about 60% so it was advisable to use most of the rectangle to create the charm. They used Sharpie markers on the smooth side to create their designs and pencil crayons on the rough side to colour them. Some used only coloured pencils to create their charms!! Once punched with a 1/4" hole for attaching, the students enjoyed using the heat guns to shrink their charms and watching "the dance" of the shrink plastic!! I added my charms between the pages on the top rung of my binding using colourful fibers. To help keep that rung of the binding closed so no charms are lost I applied double sided tape between it and the back of the spine. The students added their charms as they wished to their books.
The books are as individual as the students!!

Therese

Creating chipboard books

I have illlustrated the steps taken to create the chipboard books the students used as a base for their Chunky Art books!!

The chipboard started life as the backers of full year planning calendar which Santa brings me every year!! I cut them into strips and then into pages. The pages were then assembled into books and stacked. Each page of each book was punched using my GB Ceralox binding machine. The 3/4" black bindings were cut to size and added to complete each chipboard book!! They looked great and it was going to be perfect that the pages could removed and added to the bindings manually!! The pages are 4" x 5 1/4" or so!! I knew these pages were going to hold up to any sort of material or technique we were going to use in our books!!

Therese

Glittering accents

The students were all about using glitter - especially the girls!! We used fine glitter to embellish accents like chipboard flowers and tags as well as to jazz up some strips that could be used as borders and edging for the pages of their books!!
I applied double sided tape - Peel and stick sheets - to chipboard, burnished it well and die cut some shapes - flowers, tags, hearts, etc. It was just a matter of removing the protective layer and rubbing in the glitter. I provided the students with punchies that could be placed on the sticky side of the shapes before applying glitter to add yet another dimension to the accents they were creating.
The strips were punched with a variey of small punches and backed with packing tape. Glitter was applied to the sticky tape that was revealed through the holes creating glitzy elements for their books. In some cases, they were able to apply two different colours of glitter to the same piece by apply glitter to one sticky surface and then revealing another to which a different colour of fine glitter was applied!!
Needless to say that there was glitter in more places than was originally intended. I was grateful to have the help of a teacher to get the "extra" cleaned up.
Glitter is a fun embellishment! I really like using it with the sticky tape instead of glue.
So we were starting to have a few items that could be incorporated into the Chunky Art Books!!

Therese

Wax resist paper decorating

Paper that was decorated using wax resist techniques!!

Technique #1 - Rubbings

I gave each student a variety of papers - books pages, music sheets, bond paper, etc, a clear wax crayon and made available some items with texture. They used their clear wax crayons to make rubbings on several of the items and added watercolour which highlighted the rubbings to create some very interesting papers. To the left are the few papers I created as examples for them to use for inspiration. Theirs were far more interesting!!! Not all of them worked out perfectly but in the end but that is the way it goes when we are creating.

Clear wax crayons: Needed to be creative because clear wax crayons are not readily available. I took a bar of parrafin used to seal canning jars and cut it into 1/2" sections using a hot piece of metal and soften their edges a bit with the heat gun. A little time consuming but made perfectly acceptable clear wax crayons for the students to use!!

Items with texture: embossed plastic placemats, embossing folders, texture plates, screening, plastic mesh, fabric, etc.

Technique #2 - Wax resist using wax paper.

We created designs/texture in the wax paper by folding and crumpling, placed it between two layers of bond paper, covered both sides with plain newsprint, placed the sandwich on a pad of newspaper and used a hot iron to transfer the design from the wax paper to the bond paper. Again, they added watercolour to bring out the design created by the wax. A more subtle design - the bottom one in the photo above - which gives a different feel to the decorative paper.

These are both techniques you can use at home for use in your cardmaking!!

Therese

Handmade paper leftovers

These are sheets of paper I created using the leftovers from my papermaking session I had with the students for my art sessions!! I have inset the paper that was created when I combined the pink and blue confetti papers we used in class! Fun to mix up the colours and create new papers!!
I added geranium and pink carnation petals to the white along with some used herbal tea and grass for two different batches of paper! Also added some yellow paper napkins for colour and some apricot coloured carnations/grass/herbal tea to create a different batch of yellow paper!! I really like the handmade paper I create with natural additions!! Will have to see about using this paper in an upcoming cardmaking class!!

Therese

Handmade paper by the students

Have started a new assignment - teaching art sessions to high school students!! I really enjoy teaching art and the kids always have a different perspective and are usually open to trying new creative projects!!
We started with papermaking!! These are some of the sheets created by the students in our first class. I chose to create small sheets (3.5" x 4.25") using the small mould and deckles because we will be creating Chunky Art Books in the upcoming weeks and these will be a good size for incorporating into their books!! They created plain sheets in white, pink confetti and blue confetti. They also experimented with embossing paper using a variety of elements and adding texture as well.
Making handmade paper is a fun activity that recycles your paper scraps into new sheets of paper you can use in your art!! A win - win for me and the process is one that cannot be hurried and so is great for adding some quiet time to your day!!

Therese

Heart Pins

Had a friend who wanted a few heart pins for her friends for Valentine's so I created a variety for her to choose from!! These are a few of the ones I had left! Forgot to scan all of them!!

These are created using shrink plastic, rubber stamps and paint!! I love shrink plastic and so did the students I was teaching. You will see that we made charms for our project with it!!

I like the vibrancy that you can achieve when you shrink the art you have created!! I use the Rough and Ready which can be purchased at Michaels!!

Therese

Larger Zentangle cards

These are A2 sized cards I created using the same Zentangles!! Very versatile little pieces of art!! I kept to the black and white theme - added some texture with the SU Polka Dots embossing folder, used the MS punch for the edge of the black layer and added some black, silver and gray fiber along with a layered laser printed greeting to finish them off!!

I definitely would encourage all of you to give this technique a try!!

Therese

Student project - Zentangle cards

Zentangle cards!! The 1.5"square zentangle art is created with Sharpie markers on colour laser photocopy paper!! You can see part of the template that I gave students for creating their Zentangles.
Once finished, the artwork was cut out leaving a white border. These were layered onto black then onto a white 2.75" square card which is a great size for cutting out of 8.5 x 11 cardstock - 6 per sheet. Each student had supplies for making six cards and were able to choose their best zentangles for their cards.
The 3" square envelopes are created using a 4.25" square using the same technique as the vellum envelopes in a previous post. I used the same paper for the envelopes as I used for the zentangles. I placed a piece of regular invisible tape under one of the flaps with the sticky side facing up and just folded the two adjacent flaps down which held the envelope together. I provided them with little zentangle stickers which they could use to hold the envelope closed once they had inserted their card. I created the stickers by scanning some of my zentangles, resizing them and printing them onto labels!! The perfect touch for making elegant little cards!!

Have some fun doodling and creating some little pieces of art for use in your cardmaking!!

Therese

Student project - Zentangles!!

Zentangles!! This is a really fun technique which produces original artwork - one of the things I really like to do with the students! Every one likes to say they made it themselves!!
Check out the official Zentangle site! Intimidated? Check out these instructions for beginners!!
Really just doodling!! Important to create light, medium and dark spaces and lines. I highlighted my outer border to make sure that it framed my art nicely. I laser printed the templates on colour laser copy paper - very nice smooth finish - a great surface for using with our fine tipped black Sharpie markers!!
It takes a few to get the hang of it so I gave each student a half sheet of printed templates with eleven 1.5" squares on it and they used their six best to make their cards!!
These are some of the zentangles I created!! Totaly fun and would make great inchies!! Some students coloured theirs in with pencil crayons for a totally different effect!! Could be watercoloured in as well because the Sharpies are permanent!!

Therese

Exchange cards - handmade paper & watercolour

My CCE exchange cards!! I was so sure that I had handled my exchange cards for February that I did not even check to see if they had been sent! Alas, NO!!
So I created these four cards the other day for February and March exchange cards and sent them off. I will have to keep better track in the future!!
The two western ones have watercoloured images which were really fun to create! It was really nice to have the time to invest in doing such large images. I layered the images onto handmade paper/card fronts which were wrapped with twine. Nice effect!!
The two more winter looking ones were stamped in brown on handmade shimmer paper - left overs from a few months ago. I layered them onto handmadepaper/card fronts which had ribbon tied in a double knot. Really liked the look of these as well.
I have been teaching art sessions to high school students for the last month and a bit. It has kept me pretty busy. I will be posting the projects I taught in my sessions in the next few postings - not necessarily in order in which they were taught. I have been taking photos and scanning as I went along.

Therese