Rainy Day

The Finished Project...

The Inspiration...

www.saatchiart.com via Pinterest

Personally when I saw this picture I fell in love. I loved the newspaper and the dripping paint and the dog and the person and the umbrella. But I knew I had to use color.

What you will need:

Print outs or drawings of whatever shape/objects you want. I customized and used a girls with a dog and an umbrella.

White paper

Watercolor

Paint brush and Water cup for the watercolor

Glue/Mod Podge

Newspaper

A brush for the Mod Podge

Scissors

A watercolor safe mat

A work area

A piece of paper/material to do it on

First you are going to want to print out or draw you figurines...

Then cut them out to the best of you ability...

 You are then going to want to trace them unto blank white paper so that you can watercolor them or color them however you want...

 Then cut those out...

 Now put them on your watercolor safe mat...

 And watercolor away... I choose to make mine colorful to represent the colorfulness that can happen during the rain and the dark times. You can use whatever colors you want.

 Now while that is drying you are going to want to glue you newspaper down onto your paper and trim the edges...

 Now for the cool dripping paint. I found that my watercolor wouldn't drip down the newspaper so I had to draw lines to imitate dripping down. I didn't do this in the approximate area that the umbrella was going to go...

 Now place down and glue your figurines down and you're done!!!!!

I think it looks really cool. I hope you guys enjoyed and make it your own!

Make Your Own Watercolors!

Okay so I am a little bit addicted to YouTube so as normal I was on there and I came across this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKlhnqhxos0 that tells you how to make your own watercolors.
Although that video tells you everything you really need to know I decided that I would tell you guys also and give you some little tips and tricks.

What you will need:
1 cup of baking soda
3/4 cup of vinegar
1 cup of cornstarch
Food coloring
An ice cube tray or an egg carton or some little cups of containers to store the watercolors in
A decent sized bowl to mix everything
A spoon or another sturdy stirring device.

Some things before you get started:
1. If you are using an egg carton like I did make sure there are no holes in the bottom of the egg carton. If there are holes I would recommend taping them and then putting paper towel underneath. I had some tiny holes so when I poured my watercolor mixture in it started to leak out.
2. Be very careful with food coloring. It will stain things very easily.
3. You don't have to do those exact measurements if you don't want to. You could make more or less but these are pretty standard. Whatever you use it will be a 4:3:4 ratio. Four parts of baking soda three parts of vinegar and four parts cornstarch. But I will refer to the basic measurements in this post.

The first thing you will do is put in the cup of  baking soda...

 Now it is time to add your vinegar. It will fizz when you put it in but it shouldn't be that bad. To prevent it from overfizzing and for ease of measuring I would put in your 3/4 cup 1/4 cup at a time.
This is the mixture after 1/4 cup of vinegar.

 After 2/4...

 This is the potential fizzing...

 And after all 3/4 cup of vinegar. It'll be a nice liquidly mixture.

 You will then add your cup of cornstarch. Cornstarch can clog drains so beware not to put this down your drain.

 Stir it up. Cornstarch mixed with any liquid feels really weird. It'll look liquidy but when you stir it it will be more solid and it will also be liquidy.

 Now it is time to fill you tray or your storage containers with your mixture. I made my mistake of filling them to high so it was hard to mix in the food coloring.

 Then you will add your food coloring. Making your own watercolors is really nice because you can make whatever colors you want and you get a lot of watercolors for relatively cheap. Say you are doing a project with lots of reds then you can make a lot of red water colors or if you don't like pink then you don't have to make pink watercolors. The more food coloring you add the more liquidly it will become which is fine.

 These are watercolors right after I made them.I fyou look it looks like some of the watercolors are tie-died because I lifted my tray up with the lid on to tape some holes on the bottom and the liquid watercolor at the top totally spilled all to one side creating the tie-die effect. Hopefully once I use them  the colors I made will be underneath since i spent a lot of time making the perfect colors.

 Now because you added food coloring which is a liquid then watercolors will liquidy for a while. To use them you don't have to use water. But after awhile they will dry up and you'll need to use water.

 I had some extra watercolor mixture so I put it in this cup for white watercolor. It will show up white when you paint.

As for when you paint and it dries....
Well it turns out really cool and not like normal watercolor.  Your surface/paper will be really soft because you coated it with colored cornstarch. I think this is really cool and the colors I used turned out kind of pastelish which was really pretty. The downside is that the watercolor started to chip off because it wasn't soaked in the paper it was sitting on top. I still really like them though. I haven't used them when they are dry but I will do an update when I do.

I hoped this helped and I'd love to see what you did with this. Make it you own.

Music Heart

Now I know I said I would post Wednesday and Sunday and today is Friday so I'm sorry but I have been very busy lately. But on to the Art Journal Post...

The Finished Project...

 Inspiration...

saatchionline.com via Pinterest

What you will need...
A drawing of the heart either printed or drawn
A photocopy or actual piece of music. Please note that you will be cutting this up and therefore use something you won't want to play again. I photocopied a piece of my band music.
A pencil
A work surface
A surface to put the craft on such as paper or cardboard etc.

So first you will want to draw or print out your heart. I got mine from dragoart.com This website also shows you how to draw the heart if you want to do that.

 You will then want to cut it out to the best of your ability...

 Then print out your music or photocopy it or you can use an piece of music laying around. Old music would look really cool for this project. You will then want to trace the outline of your heart onto your music...

And cut it out...

Then just add whatever detailing you want to the heart. You don't have to do any detailing but I just redrew what was on the heart printout in black colored pencil. And then glue it down...

Then you can write whatever you want or decorate it however you want. I wrote the caption that was on the Inspirational Pin from Pinterest.

And I don't know if you can tell a different from the last picture to this one but later I went back and added some shading with the black colored pencil.

I totally like this idea but I feel that mine could've turned out better. I wish that I had used more color and as my mom told me the heart looks too real. I wish I had dome cooler lettering and had distressed the music sheet.
Please leave comments and maybe a picture of this. I'd love to see how you made it your own.

Crocheting Hats?!

So I know that this may be a shock but over the past couple of weeks I have started crocheting! Now this is not going to be a tutorial but I do want to give you some tips that I found out if you want to do it. This is great for beginners.

And sorry for the randomness of this post.

So first of all the hats I crocheted...
This was the first one...

And this is the second one...

I personally like the second one better. The first one uses double crochet (if you are a crocheter) and the second one uses single crochet and a decrease.

These are the videos I used...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rip0Zqw6nbI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2iayZ7DCws
They are both by the same person and are really easy to follow. The first one is for the first hat and the second one is for the second hat.

As for the first one I was really curious as of what is looked like before you pulled the top together so here is a picture of that...

And as for weaving if you don't have the right needle you are forced to use your hands. I didn't but I found it particularly helpfulto just put a piece of tape around the end so it would be stiff and the ends wouldn't stray.

This goes for anything you have to weave. I also think this would look good if you did the double crochet but did a slight decrease as done in the second hat.

As for the second hat you might be able to tell that I didn't do it exactly like she said. After I got to a certain point I just kept skipping stitches until I got until there were no more stitches left. I cut my string and pulled it on the inside where I just did some random knots like she demonstrates in the video.

If you have any questions at all please leave them down below and I will answer them to the best of my ability. Also any requests?!

Have fun taking your knowledge of crochet and applying it in different ways. Mix up the stitches and decrease or not. Make it your own.  By the way hats look really cool with multi color yarn.

Tree Branch

The Finished Project...

The Inspiration...

What you will need:

A material to do this on

A workplace and a mat or surface you can get paint on

A writing/coloring utensil

Watercolor (it will give you the best results) but you could use anything

A paint brush

A water cup with water in it

A stencil for the tree branch or you can free hand it like I did

 A funny story about how this came to be. When I first set out to do this art journal page I was planning on making this...

I tried to use watercolor but things didn't turn out too well. I ended up with this...

The circles weren't distinct and I didn't like how it looked for what I was trying to do with it. So I ended up water coloring the whole page. That would be the first step. (This page is really quite easy)

 If you don't have watercolors coloring with washable markers and misting/spraying/dousing with water with create a water colored affect.
When it was dry it looked like this.

 Then you are simply going to want to draw/trace whatever design you wish on top, I chose a tree branch. You can do it in any color but I choose black because it was what was used in the example and it gave a nice contrast. you can barely see it traced in this picture but it's there. I used black colored pencil by the way.

 And then just fill it in and you are done...

My tree branch could've been better but I am proud of how it turned out. This project is very versatile. You can do whatever colors you want or a black/gray background with a color picture on top.
Make it your own and I would love it if you would comment some ideas of things you want to see and any tips on how to make the posts better. Thanks :)

Collage

My Collage...

So... I had to decorate a manilla folder for Health with 10 things about me/I cared about. I decided to make a collage. I don't know a way to really tell you how to make a collage but I wanted to show you   the collage I did and just give you some tips.

My first tip is to make a background for your collage and then glue whatever things you want to collage on top.

So for my background I took a sheet of newspaper and watercolored it in a stripe pattern. This is how it turned out...

I then glued it on my folder. I didn't use any mod podge for this project so you guys would know that you don't need mod podge.  If you don't use mod podge although you could I would use liquid glue and not glue sticks. I think the method I used works better for decorating notebooks and folders.

 For this collage I had to do ten things about me. My tips for collages is to use different colors and textures and methods for the things you are collaging.
My first thing about me was softball. I cut a circle, watercolored it and drew the red lines on with marker.

The second thing about me was music so I printed off this cool treble clef music thing.

 So this one isn't really something about me but something important to me. I printed off a dog outline, traced it on some plain white paper, and cut it out. This is supposed to represent my dog, Piper.

 Because I was running out of ideas I also used a printed picture of a clarinet along with music, since I play the clarinet.

 The next two are also more of things that are important to me rather than about me. I just simply wrote the word family in black marker.

 I also wrote the word friends in the same fashion.

 And I really love skittles so I printed off a picture of skittles.

 I like to read so I drew a book.

 I also love to swim, I love to be in the water, and I'm on the summer swim team so I drew some waves, cut them out, and water colored them blue.

 And of course I had to do crafts so I used newspaper letters to spell the word crafts.

 After I had all ten done I glued them down. When gluing them down I would recommend mixing up the black and white with the colored, and the big with the little.

 To seal it up instead of using mod podge I just used clear packing tape. I feel that for notebooks and folder packing tape works better than mod podge.

I am so happy about this collage and that it was a school assignment. I hoped this help you for folder collages