I took another class with Julie and this was the canvas we did.

This was done with artist grade shrink plastic and colored before shrinking.

Isn't she fabulous.  She has an honored place on my fireplace mantel.

I took two of her classes in March of 2013.  The first class was called Life Journal and the second was called Art is in the Heart.  I am posting images for the second class.  No images from the journal as i haven't taken pictures of it yet.

The background was textured, stamped, painted, and embellished.  The items under the heart are distressed paint brushes.  Here are some close-ups of the center section with the heart.

I still have work to do on this piece and will post a pic when it is done.

This was made for a swap that I was in. The background is made of fabric with beading on top.  There are single beads and clusters of beads.  The clusters consist of keishi pearls, size 11 and size 15 sead beads.  The heart consists of ironed angelina fibers which was cut out in the shape of a heart.  The heart was then stitched to the background using silk thread.  The left half of the heart was embroided with beads while on the right side I stitched another cluster as an embellishment.

I belong to a group that meets once a month to trade Artist Trading Cards.  At these meetings we always do some kind of technique for backgrounds, etc.  For our September meeting the theme is mail.

I always love an organic piece and an open canvas.

Here is the artist trading card I did for the Beneath the Sea theme.  I had fun with this but my hand was so tired after doing 10 of these.  I used inspiration from Suzanne's blog Tinkered Art Studio.

I have been doing a digital workshop with Cynthia Powell from The Latest Trends in Mixed Media yahoo group. We have worked through 4 tutorials at this point and on the last one she challenged us to come up with a digital ATC. We had to use the techniques learned in the tutorials PLUS use one we hadn't learned from the tutorial. So here are some of the things I did. For the first layer (the background) I used a solid color of white. I tried black, blue, magenta, purple, etc. and found that the white background highlighted the layers the best. For the next layer, I used a piece that I had created in a class with Karen O'Brien.

The next three layers were 3 different masks which I tried to find with colors that went with the background I was using. I then used a sheet of music for the next layer. I varied the opacity with each of these last 4 layers.

The 7th layer was the image of the masked lady. This I had to extract from the original image. After placing her on the O'Brien background I decided I needed to add touches of color from the background on her dress. To do this I had to use the adjust color option under the Enhance menu. From there I chose replace color and then highlighted her dress with varying shades of green, blue, and magenta.

The last layer was the text iteself. Originally the text was in white but it was just too stark so I "greyed" it down. After moving the text box around, I placed it where it is presently.

Whew, after saving all of this I saved in the Photoshop Elements 6 format (.psd) and resaved as a jpeg file for posting on the web. This is the finished product.



I would like to send a special thanks to Cynthia Powell for her most excellent tutorials on using PSE 6.0. If you have any questions or comments, please post in the comment section below.

This instructions for this mixed media pin are in the book Jewelry Beyond Time.