What to post when my camera isn't working? Let's see what photos I've taken recently of projects I've been working on that use Memory Box products that I haven't yet shared on this blog.
I recently finished a book project I've been working on while participating in an online class/challenge with Roni on her Ink Stains blog. I titled it "My Cancer, An Artful Journey to Recovery". I made each bookboard page in the shape of a house and added a smaller cracker box/cereal box board house shape on top of that where I tried out different background techniques that Roni suggested. I also added a quote to each page that had some significance for me. This is one of my favorite pages:
For this page I wanted to use as many related Memory Box stamps as I could. Since I have lots of crows/ravens, I started by gathering these stamps:
- B1389 Crow
- E1392 Old Fence
- D1393 Bird in Flight
- F1394 Distressed Crows
- C1137 Chair
- E1300 Flurry of Birds
I used a piece of 6X6 paper from the Blackbird packet to cover the larger chipboard house shape.
The technique for this page involved using a book page for the background and painting over it. I chose a page titled "About Crows" from a Cornell Nature Handbook in my used book stash. I then chose three acrylic paint colors that I thought coordinated with the Blackbird paper--a metallic copper, a metallic red, and a flat peach. I applied the paint with a flat brush to create small "boxes" of color that I could stamp onto, leaving some of the original text and the illustration showing through the lightly applied paint. Once the paint was dry (which didn't take long at all), I used Archival Jet Black ink to stamp each of the images. I used post-it notes to mask areas where I wanted only part of an image. I typed up the quote, printed it out, cut it into sections, smudged it with Distress Tea Dye ink, and then added it to the page.
For those of you who like to work in altered books, this is an easy and fun technique. I can also think of many ways to adapt this for creating cards. Instead of using this in my book, I could easily have used the painted and stamped page adhered to a card front. Blocks of paint on watercolor paper with stamped images could also easily become a card. I even think the box board papered/painted/stamped piece could go through the mail as a post card if cut to the correct size with a message and address on the other side. Try adding some acrylic paint to printed scrapbook paper and then stamp on it. There are so many interesting papers to use with coordinating paint colors and complementary stamped images!
Happy Stamping!
