It's a Creative World: Deck of Daydreams

All About Us...

Welcome to IACW
We are a diverse group of talented, fun loving, crafters who want to share loads of great stuff with you. Inspired by colour, paper, fabric, nature, patterns, sounds, architecture, we love to create and we're not afraid to experiment. We have our roots from around the world and are constantly learning and gaining inspiration from the world around us. We hope you enjoy your visit to our blog.

Deck of Daydreams

Kel here, with a closer look at the journal cards I showed you earlier this month. Thanks for stopping by!

I made sixteen of these in a class taught by LK Ludwig. I don't want to give away all her secrets, so if you're interested and want to learn more, do check out her website as she runs classes online. I will show you some of my cards and talk a little about the techniques though.

We spent the morning painting backgrounds. We scraped and stencilled and stamped and spritzed, adding paint and taking it off, never letting it get too thick and keeping the surface nice and smooth. In the afternoon we looked at ways of adding our images to the cards and how to work into those images.

This is a photo I took in Barcelona, looking out of the cafe window down onto street performers along La Rambla. I love sitting watching the world go by from a coffee shop and this card will have a quote about solitude or some journalling about that simple pleasure. The photo was added with a gel medium transfer right onto the paint and the coffee cup was brought out with white coloured pencil and a sketching pencil.

This picturesque piece of shoreline is in Porlock, Somerset. The glossy photo is covered with a thin layer of tissue. I then doodled on it with white and black gel pens. It looked pretty bad for a while, but I carried on working, with Neocolor II crayons (their spelling, not mine btw!). I love the painterly way it turned out. The greatest thing I have ever learned about art is to keep on working through the ugly. If it stays ugly, you haven't lost anything, but if you push on through, you may get something far better than you were expecting.

I love this photo of a broken sign, bare trees and an old brick wall. Because the contrast between the different elements was quite low though, people have struggled to see in the photo what I always have. Working onto a tissue layer, using colouring pencils to lighten, darken and brighten different areas allowed me to bring out what I wanted in the picture. Wouldn't it be fun to work on a photo in photo editing software and at the same time work on one with your colouring pencils and see which one you preferred in the end?

This dear buddha from my Dad's house was transferred to watercolour paper with a gel medium transfer. There are lots of ways of doing this, and different techniques bring different results as you would expect. He hasn't been developed much yet, and I think in this case, I won't. I just went over the bright white torn edges with a yellow crayon to blend them into the background.

I forget where I took this photo, because I do have a lot of tree photos! It's a gel medium transfer straight onto the paint. It looked pretty, but a little unfinished until I decided to extend the tree image onto the background with colouring pencils. As you can see from the quote, I may well end up with a stack of quotes and reflections on solitude. I promise you I am not antisocial, but I certainly find solitude both inspiring and restoring.

The question now is what to do with them. One option is to bind them together in a book. I know a couple of bindings that should work, and LK Ludwig's cards looked fantastic all bound together with a very clever binding, so I may have to try to work that one out.

I am quite tempted to keep them loose though, as they are so tactile and fun to shuffle. Also, when they are all journalled with quotes and thoughts I think they could be a little magic - have you ever stumbled across exactly the quote you needed on the day you needed to hear it? If I'm keeping them loose, I will need something special to keep them in - maybe a box or pouch, custom made to fit. Hmmm, something to be getting on with...