Altered By Me

Occasionally I get a chance to play in the Rangerinklink yahoo group monthly challenge. This month the challenge is to use one of Tim Holtz's techniques from his 12 Days of Tags. If you haven't seen Tim's blog you just don't know what you are missing. Check it out. This years Tag's are coming to a close but there is a link for the 2007 + 2008 tags on his side bar. I made this 4 x 4 piece using Ranger & Paper Imagery Designs products. All of the purple elements and background are from Ranger products. The image, clock transparency and watch elements are from Paper Imagery Designs . It is one of my favorites and is relatively new so if you haven't checked out the website lately go check it out again. There is also some great Christmas images sheets available. To see some artwork made by the Design Team using Paper Imagery Designs images check out the Paper Imagery Designs blog Thanks for stopping by! Arlene

This weeks challenge on the Paper Imagery Designs yahoo group is doodle. I am not sure if the 4 x 4 above qualifies for doodling but it is my version of a doodle. I painted a piece of watercolor paper and used a stencil on top of the paint. I placed the stencil on the center of the 4 x 4 and loaded a wide regular paintbrush with 2 colors of acrylic paint. When I say regular paint brush I mean the small 3 inch cheapo brushes you buy when you are painting your house. I then pounced the paint over the stencil. Then I took the stencil and turned it over onto one of my art journal pages and rolled a brayer over it. This is a cool technique to getting a layered look to your journal pages. I learned this technique on Michelle Wards GPP Street Team blog. Let me go find the link so you can see how much fun it is and maybe you will join in on one of Michelle's monthly challenges. Here is the link for Crusade No. 28 And here is the link to my blog post showing how I used these techniques on...

Do you enjoy challenges? Sometimes I do and then sometimes I don't. One of the recent challenges I participated in on the PID yahoo group was grunge. I've never set out to make a piece of "grunge" art before but after spending some time on google I realized that some of the art I create could fit well in the grunge category. Here is an atc I made for the grunge challenge. I recently bought a set of Gouache paints for an unbelievable price and I wanted to see how they worked. The halo of color you see around the vintage woman is made with two colors of the Gouache paint. Here is a 4 x 4 that I made for the button themed challenge a few weeks ago. Have you ever made a piece of art and thought to yourself that your images just fade into the background? Your happy with the background so you don't think that's the problem. So what can you do? What I like to do is use a charcoal pencil to outline the elements of the page like I did with my button challenge 4 x 4 b...