Speaking of ARTastic, our new challenge is up, and as always I'm hoping to see some familiar friendly faces between the participants! The inspiration for this month's challenge is the beautiful Edouard Manet painting "Argenteuil". The critiria are:
* Two people in the picture
* Used striped pp
* Use a boat somewhere on the LO
For my DT submission, I knew immidiately which picture I wanted to use ... one of my two oldest children with my daughter giving her older brother a look of total adoration. I've been in love with this picture forever and always will be.
Isn't that look something? Mind you, they were 4 and 5 years old in that picture ... now, almost 7 years later, we hardly see that look on either one of their faces anymore. But ooh, sweet memories :-)
The use of striped pp had me worried there for a while. I'm not used to using striped pp and I hardly have any in my stash. But once I had decided to not use it as a background but use it to create some feature elements, in this case the hearts, it all came together beautifully.
I actually used real sand on this LO, but later covered most of it with my papers. Still, the effect in real life hasn't been lost, it looks kinda neat! The background has been painted in different shades of blue and I added some tissue papers to create some texture as well. My main concern was to keep the focus on the picture, which is why I used a light music sheet paper as the background for the pic. Still, I couldn't resist adding a bold red title and some other fun elements. I'm quite happy with the result though.
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I never posted last month's ARTastic challenge, nor did I post the LO I made for that challenge yet. This one is very dear to me, it features my grandmother who died about 3 weeks after this picture of her holding my youngest daughter Christina was taken.
My mom and I believe she held on just long enough to see the baby. Though she hadn't been sick and her death came as a surprise, we later on discovered she had lost the will to live after my granddad had died a year earlier. Seeing Christina seemed to have been the only thing she found worthwile enough to hang on just that little bit longer.
This was the firsts LO I made after my absence, and I kept it fairly simple to get the hang of it again. Still, it turned out just the way I wanted it to.
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Since I'm back into my scrapping, it won't be long till I start visiting your blogs again. I've actually started reading some of my friends' blogs, but I'm sure you can imagine I have a lot of catching up to do! It's worth it though, I've missed reading all of your stories and seeing your beautitul work.
So, I'll be seeing you soon!
xxx Peggy
I didn't follow the painting this month, just the criteria, which are:
My "happy" design turned out a bit childish ... Christina, my youngest daughter, who normally adores just about everything I make, asked if it was finished already LOL. She thought it to be "empty" and not exactly "true to my own style". She might be right, but I really do love it more and more each time I look at it. This page takes me back to a wonderful day and makes me smile ... and isn't that really all it's supposed to do?
I so love the result! I decided not to try too hard, which seemed to have done the trick to finally be able to complete a page like this! I started out modestly ... the head and body don't belong to each other, but they easily could, which they are not supposed to I think. The collage isn't all that obvious, which is why I drew her legs, because even the legs I chose matched the rest of the girl perfectly LOL. I'm sure I'll get better at it if I keep trying, and I will, because it's just so much fun! Obviously this took me more than 10 minutes, but that's okay too. I'll just work in this journal whenever I feel like it, whenever I have some spare time. I'll be fun trying out new techniques in this book without being afraid if it will "match" the rest of the page. This book will be just for me and me only. Can you tell I'm excited about this??
Haha, I don't know if you can tell, but I tried to make flowers in the foreground and a sky and two trees in the background. And I didn't decide on that untill after quite a few layers ... So this is just layer over layer over layer smeared out paint with an old credit card. Pretty amazing that you can actually make something recognizable that way, isn't it? I'm just leaving it like this in my journal, I don't feel the need to journal over it. I thought about it, which is why I hadn't posted it yet, but decided against it.
Not impressed??? Well neither am I at this point. But this is the background of my new art journal page. I have absolutely no idea what I'll be doing with it next, but I'm excited to find out LOL!
This is my youngest daughter Christina, showing me some attitude... I thought these pictures were just perfect for this challenge. I drew and painted most of the criteria, like the melon, the swirls, my Jack and the "scary" tree (which turned out more huggable than scary LOL). The fence was something I kept from a birthday cake (nothing's save from a scrapper!!!) and the web is stitched. 
I know, it's a tough one!!! And if this wasn't hard enough, here are the criteria which you should try to work into your LO:
The picture shows my 1 month old son (picture taken 11 years ago) and our German Shepherd Jenny, who passed away several years ago. She was extremely protective of my kids, and this picture means a lot to me. It really shows her wonderful and kind nature.
I copied the angel from an image by a very talented artist named DJ, you can find her blog 
Isn't that just gorgeous!???!!! Thank you so much DJ for letting me use your image, I appreciate it.
The texture of the wings (and also the hair) was once again done with mere gel medium and a palette knife. I just smeared a lot of gel medium inside the drawn lines, and used the palette knife to create some distinct lines. Once it was dry, I gave it a ground colour and later on dry brushed over it with white acrylic paint. Because of the "lines", only the top is covered completely with white, still showing the underlying colour. This really is a wonderful technique to add some texture to a page, it looks fantastic, it really does, and it's so easy!!
She managed to use just about all of the bling I own on one single page LOL. As is typical for Christina, she asked me what I would do, and then did the entire thing her own way LOL. However, she did it all on her own, didn't ask for help once, and I think it turned out great! Not bad for an 8 year old, right???
Once I started playing with all of the different elements, they all changed place a bit, but they are still there. I used three photo's in stead of 6 blocks, placed the paper originally at the bottom on the left hand side, and used the shape of the round flower to make my title (which says "Sometimes it just clicks" btw - and oops, for the dutchies: I just noticed I miss a 't' ... ah well, too late to do anything about that now!!). I haven't worked with sketches all that much, so I don't know of this is "allowed" or not, but it seemed rather funny to me how you can start from one point and head over in an entire different direction. Still, the sketch really helped me create my take on the design, and I think I will begin to use sketches more often from now on.
I used some cool techniques on this LO, so be sure to keep an eye out for my next post ;-)))
