The Altered Alice Chapter 6: Painting the Roses Red!

 

'A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, `Look out now, Five! Don't go splashing paint over me like that!'  -- Chapter 8, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 

The club cards were painting the white roses red to avoid angering the Queen of Hearts, so your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to use PAINT on your creation! Of course you can paint it RED like the design team will be doing, but you can also use other colors. You need to tell us what item was painted and what technique you used!

We are sponsored this month by Creative Inspirations [Store | Blog], makers of wonderful shimmering paint which comes in almost 60 colors, including clear iridescent Fairy Dust. They also carry hot fix Jeweled Inspirations and Metallic Inspirations; I am particularly intrigued by the latter as they look like brilliant nail heads. The Altered Alice design team will be using Garnet paint, a bright sparkling red, and I hope the Creative Inspirations design team might decide to play along! The winner of this month's challenge will receive five colors of their choice.

Be sure to enter by 11:59 p.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC -4:00) on Friday, August 26. The winner and honorable mentions will be announced the last Sunday of the month on August 28.


My Art Journal Page


I have wanted to try art journaling for a long time and decided to jump in with supplies I had on hand, namely a 40 cent composition book and some big ideas. Like fellow design team members Erin and Terri, I had to use this fabulous Stampin' Up embossing folder with big bold roses. (My sister is an SU demo and offers a lot of specials, so if you *need* this folder let me know!)

I used a piece of heavy acetate (I actually recycled a Spellbinders package) and embossed it.  Then I followed Barbara's method of painting with the shimmering Creative Inspirations paint from the back side of the acetate. At first it was very streaky, but the paint dries very quickly, especially given that it was a non-porous surface. I gave it about four coats and it has the most unbelievable glistening radiance in real life. The garnet paint is a bright gleaming red but the shimmer is a deep fuschia pinky-violet color! Fabulous! From the front, I just went over all the raised lines with a black Sharpie and trimmed it out. I LOVE this look! Spellbinders Foliage rose leaves complete the focal point.

As this was the cheapest of cheap paper, first I coated the whole page with Ranger gesso. Then I used my airbrush with Copic markers to tint the page green at the bottom and blue at the top. My foam brush still had some white gesso in it, so I dabbed in some clouds.

Next, I used a Plaid rose stencil and pounced gesso through it using a foam brush. When it was dry, I partially painted my white rose red and added some drips of paint. I outlined the drops and segments of the rose with a black sharpie felt tip marker, and added some white gleams on the drops with a Posca pen.  Then I took a 0.3 Copic Multiliner SP to write in the quote from Chapter 8 about painting the roses red. I tucked in some other words here and there. I really like how this turned out! At this point I had the stenciled rose on the left and the acetate roses that would be placed somewhere to the right but it was missing something. I had planned to use two stamps I had of the card characters that were painting the tree, but they were way too small to hold up against all my huge roses.

I purchased this amusing Queen of Hearts from Mo's Digital Pencil. I wanted to print her larger than the normal, so I used a FREE program called SmillaEnlarger to blow up the image a bit. I think this program does a better job of enlarging than Photoshop; it is a great utility. This allowed me to print it at a blown up size without the least hint of jaggy pixels.  I colored her in with Copics then trimmed her out with a bit of a margin.  But when I placed the cutout on my page, she fell right into the busy background stenciled rose. So I used my black sharpie to color all the margins black, which gave it a nice bold outline. Now it can hold its own amongst the other elements.

I couldn't resist adding this snarky comment, just for fun! It makes me laugh as the Queen looks so out of control!

I hope you have enjoyed my first foray into art journaling as much as I have! After creating this page, I did some "research" (a.k.a. pestering  design team member and art journal expert Sue Roddis!), and have now ordered a Moleskine sketchbook of my very own! Two actually; a red one for Alice and a black one for everything else. I got them for a fantastic price on Amazon!


If you decide to buy some, please use the links above to do so. I will get a small referral fee and you will get the same great price. It is a small way you can help to support this blog and The Altered Alice. Eventually it might cover my Linky Tools and professional Photobucket subscriptions, LOL!!!


I love hearing from you; please let me know what you think about this page, about embossing acetate, art journals, smarty-pants remarks, or anything else you like! Then hurry up and PAINT something and link it on The Altered Alice! Time is running out. . . tick tock, tick tock!