PaperArtsy Blog - 2022 Year in Review {Topics 1 to 4}

Season's Greetings from PaperArtsy HQ,

As we look back at 2022, I personally find this feature is often a time to reflect on the past year. This year, I find myself looking back at the past 3 years, something I have been really reluctant to do as it's been such a weird period, the likes of which most of us have never experienced before, and I am sure we have all been impacted directly in ways that we probably really want to move away from. But I'm going to jump in and dig a little bit deeper.

For us here at PaperArtsy we also moved our business mid-pandemic from England to France. We have moved country once before, 20 years ago from New Zealand to England, and that was pretty challenging in many unexpected ways, but this time, to move to a country that speaks a language we are not fluent in, that was never going to be quite so straightforward! It was a decision we had researched for 3 years prior to the move, and one which we knew was going to be equal parts exciting and terrifying. But our life changing challenge was diminished considerably as we came to learn of the deep losses many suffered over the same timeframe due to a pandemic.

In this post, I'd like to pay special tribute to retailers, we work closely with a handful in various countries across the world. They were so supportive of our move, and at the same time were dealing with thier own challenges juggling so many new unknowns in such a short space of time; from getting stock online, to kerbside pick ups, quarantine, and all the while ensuring the safety of customers and staff alike. They took everything in thier stride, got stock online rapidly, as well as demos, classes, unboxing deliveries, flash sales and even being personal shoppers. There were many times where I realised how fortunate we were as a sector. We were already pretty familiar with various online platforms for education, communication and shopping. We are still navigating some delivery delays, and so I take this moment to thank customers the world over for supporting their independent retailers, and being patient with us all!

Anyhow, enough from me, Dounia has selected some posts from Topics #1: Opposites Attract, #2: Pattern Play, #3: Second Life and #4: Interactive. It's agony choosing just a couple of posts to showcase each topic; there are just so many that really are incredible creative offerings! If you want to seek the entire topic, then she has included links to the topic intro, and you can go from there to look back at each of the posts, you might even like to leave a comment. In 2022 we announced a few new blog teamies, and they have all settled in just beautifully and will continue with us for another year in 2023. We deliberately added a more international flavour to this creative space, I love to see how people craft and if their style is reflective of the flavour of their home country.

 

Get ready for a bit of bling, brightness, and blooming good fun as we look back on the first 4 topics of 2022!

Leandra 

For this new year, we decided to be a bit educational as well as inspirational! Colour is a huge part of any crafters world but we do not always feel confident experimenting and playing with it. Worry sets in that we might make mud or end up with clashing results. Teaching you (gently) about colour theory is a way to help you understand why colour works better some times than others, and how you can deliberately make mud if you need to!

Throughout 2022, the blog has offered topics exploring the colour wheel, how to make one, how to use it and how to spice it up to try new and unexpected colour combinations. We hope the topics introductions and our bloggers' posts will become a reference for you to fall back on and further your colour game. 

To compliment our introduction to this yearly theme, Leandra showed live how to create your own colour wheel, with an emphasis on branching away from the classic bright Magenta/Blue/Yellow primaries. The community had fun with our wheel template and the results were amazing! Once you have your own wheel (downloaded from the @paperartsy Instagram  linktree bio), this first topic focuses on the most famous and simple colour combination: opposite colours! A sure way to achieve the greatest of colour contrasts, our bloggers also show you it is also a bit more versatile than you might expect!

Let's start with a classic: Orange & Blue with this journal page by Claire Snowdon. The opposite colours create immediate contrast between the background and the focal images, making the elements 'pop'. That is what opposites are all about, a tension between 2 colours that conflict with each other directly, yet when balanced together there is an energy and 'POP' that makes art zing!

I love the balance and openness of Claire's composition, which allows us to really enjoy her gorgeous layered background, the perfect backdrop for the sunny flowers. Check her original blog post to discover all the steps of this fun and intuitive project.

Kate Yetter also choose to work with bright and fun colours but in the less ubiquitous Magenta/ & Yellow Green combination. Magenta really takes the lead here, as a bold background. The slightly less saturated green makes the contrast more subtle but no less effective! I love how Kate used stamped tissue paper to create a softer transition between her two colours. Go to original blog post to see all the yummy textured she put into this piece of mail art!

Jennie Atkinson is generally more a tonal type of crafter and approached this combination of Light Orange & Blue-Purple cautiously! Her beautiful memory book, with its softer tones and delicate layers, really shows that opposites colours do not need to be bold and bright to work. Her original blog post is a great example of how unexpected inspiration can be, as she gradually gets to know her colours and experiments with tone and contrast.

Patterns are everywhere around us, from natural compositions to architectural constructions, from leaves to skylines, butterflies to textiles and everything in between. They are also the backbone of arts and crafts, populating backgrounds, creating textures or bringing depth to simpler images. 

With this topic we wanted to shine a light on those humble patterns and explore the joy they bring both during and after creation. To help you on your pattern journey, the introduction post includes a very useful video by Tracy Scott, demonstrating how she goes about her own pattern play and sharing some tricks for repeat stamping. Our team of bloggers then offered their own interpretation of the theme, adding patterns from the background to the foreground with a variety of techniques. Here are a few examples.

Amanda Pink took advantage of Ellen Vargo's abstract stamps, perfect for pattern play, to create a 'Happy Box' and its cards. The bright colours and black stamping contrast beautifully to achieve a striking and cohesive look. The patterns truly are the stars of the show! Her blog post gives you a closer look at all the cards that went into this box, and shows how fun and addictive pattern play can be. It is full of techniques to get the most out of your stamps, a must read!

Martha Ponsanesi managed to make her background the main feature in this peppy journal page! I love how the yellow green is so eye-catching while still showcasing the other elements. Notice how the pink circle are both embellishments and part of the pattern? Go to her original blog post to see all the subtle layers of this deceptively simple project, a real play on tonal colours. Proof that you don't necessarily need lots of supplies to create interest and impact!

In this beautiful journal spread, Renata Peley used subtle pattern in her background to provide interest and make the focals pop! Her original blog post details her play session with her gel plate, some pretty blue Fresco acrylic paints, her stamps and repurposed packaging to create a whole series of patterns. Another simple and addictive technique and a great way to make coordinated papers. Her trick to avoid choosing among them - use them all!

Another focus this year on the blog was sustainable crafting, developed along several topics this year. This is the first of those where our team tries its hand at repurposing objects and giving them a new life as art! 

We all are used to incorporating book-text in our projects, or keeping pieces of pretty packaging,  but here we wanted to go a step further and look at how (somewhat) ordinary objects can be transformed and elevated. They can provide unusual materials, build an original substrate or structure, or be unique embellishments. The idea is to encourage us to look at everyday objects differently and see potential use and beauty in all things! Keren's introduction post is full of such creative ideas and our bloggers were also inspired, have a look.

My first pick is a classic, always wonderful: altered boxes and tins. The perfect way to either secret away or display little treasures! Here Autumn Clark made matchboxes into two delightful and intricate art dolls. All the layers and the subtle colouring really make the most out of those Lynne Perrella stamps! Check her original blog post to see her process and how she dissected and reassembled her stamps for truly custom-made dolls.

Jennie Atkinson mixed two of her favourite hobbies: papercrafts and needlecrafts into a whimsical pin cushion. A beautiful and useful new life for this lonely teacup! She really had great fun making it not just a practical object but a complete scene with intricate details. I just love the butterflies that seem ready to flutter away if you reach for a pin. Go to Jennie's original blog post for interesting techniques with Infusions and details of all the tiny elements.

Liesbeth Fidder de Vos was certainly inspired by the topic and used her imagination to transform a book cover and some old jeans into a classy handbag! How crazy is that! I am impressed by how well she was able to match the various elements for a cohesive look. Especially considering she had no concrete plan when she started... Her original blog post details this extensive process and makes it achievable if you are on the look for a new accessory.

One could argue that any art or craft piece is interactive: it certainly is a conversation between the maker and viewer. This topic was all about pushing that aspect further, building connections and creating surprise. 

You can find interaction between layers of a project: using cheeky peek-a-boo windows, overlaying delicate lace pages, or taking advantage of transparent layers. Creating ways to make the viewer physically interact with your work is also great fun: flaps, folds and doors you can open revealing little secrets; tabs, strings or levers you can pull to animate the artwork; shaker niches, pop-up elements or turning cogs to bring that 'wow' moment. Large scale artwork can even blur the line between viewer and actor, check the great examples in Keren's into post. Let's not forget pieces that interact with their environment, to initiate movement like mobiles, paper lanterns or candle carrousels, or to involve the senses like wind-chimes, sun-catchers or tactile art. Interaction can be a small tentative connection or a full body experience but it always deepens and enriches our experience of art. 

Laurie Case did a bit of stamp deconstruction to create her city for this cute and dimensional panel. Not sure the result is the most structurally sound, as the tallest house can apparently easily loose its roof, revealing a beautiful message on a tab! The background is subtly complex and helps to give the project a cohesive look despite using the whole rainbow. A great balancing exercise! Check her original blog post to see the twists of this project's journey.

Etsuko Noguchi chose to play with depth and layers with this intricate and colourful carrousel book. Her original blog post details the process and dimensions, it is not as complicated as one might think! I love how the open layers play with each other for a very delicate look. This is also a throwback to topic #1, turquoise and orange being opposites on the colours wheel! They provide great contrast between the background and frames, leaving a wide stage for the focal images to shine in subtler colours.

Riikka Kovasin went full on articulated and playful, mixing jumping jack and art doll. She was inspired by orthodox icons and between the rich purple colours and the gold embellishments, that certainly translated in the result. I love the unexpected use of Seth Apter's stamps: apparently they make great byzantine decorations! Her original blog post explains the construction of the doll: the face is casted with hot glue, available to anyone, how great is that!

Well, wasn't that a fabulous array of wonderful!? We are so spoiled by our blogging team and the lengths they go to creating their projects. I hope you can appreciate the time they put into each piece, but more importantly, how much they enjoy what they do while creating.

We'll be back tomorrow with more highlights from the PaperArtsy Blog, hope to see you again!

Dounia 

2022 Topic 09: Leftovers {by Floss Nicholls} with Ellen Vargo stamps

Hi everyone, it's Floss from flossworkshopart with you today, and I'm here to share how you can use up some of your scraps of fabric along with packaging papers to create a stitched collaged piece.

I love to use papers and materials together on one piece and delving into both my leftover oddments of small material pieces, remnants of packaging papers and ribbon left overs, it allowed me to use up some bits I already had. By printing some fabulous geometric shapes from Ellen Vargo's stamp sets EEV01 and EEV09  it allowed me not only to add some fun elements and a flower focal point to the piece but to give the leftovers a new lease of life and become something new.

I often use bits of old clothing within my artwork and I particularly liked the way I had used gesso and Infusion dye stains in a previous journal project I made; using an old white shirt of my husbands. The shirt had a fabulous loose woven texture in its weave, so it lent itself perfectly to grabbing gesso at low and high spots on the fabric which added to the textures created. I had some left over scraps of this, that I had already stained individually using Olive Tree, The Sage and Sunset Beach infusions, so I rummaged through my net scrap bag to find a few bits that went well together to use with them.

I use the little net bags (that the supermarkets now provide as an option to use when buying their loose veg) to store my fabric scraps and my sari silks etc...I was so happy when the supermarkets replaced their plastic veg bags with these little net drawstring bags because they suit keeping all manner of material scraps perfectly as you can see through them.

Here I am playing around with positions of how edges and colours work together.

Infusions dye stain tip: Use a paintbrush to even out the dark spots where pigments stick to the wetted material and brush it lightly over the gesso to tint the gesso with the beautiful range of colours found within the Infusions Dye Stain. Naturally the Infusions will soak into the material when you spray it with water but it will sit on top of the gesso giving you such great contrasts.

I like to stitch in the centre of some material collaged pieces to allow for more raw edges or the space to fray some edges. I chose a straight machine stitch throughout this art piece, rather than using any zigzag stitching as I knew this collage was going to be a 'busy' one, and thought that the zigzag might be too distracting from the rest of it. Use a fabric glue or a running hand stitch if you haven't got a sewing machine.

It's tempting to add hand stitched features to add further interest to your sewn pieces at this stage, but I personally would wait until the end to add these details.

It's fun to add separate material pieces on top and stitch in the other direction using uneven lengths of stitching too... 

I used these three vibrant Infusions Dye Stains in a previous project over gesso that had been applied to a white cotton shirt that was never to be worn again.

I used Ellen's EEV09 stamp set on some of the Sunset Beach dyed fabric scraps using Ranger Archival Black ink and cut them out to arrange as petals for my flower feature. The circle flower centre was printed on a scrap piece of a gel print also using the Archival Ink and the edge was folded over to create the cone flower centre shape. I used the square and the iron shape from Ellen's EEV09 set using PaperArtsy Heavy Cream Fresco finish chalk paint  on some scraps of packaging paper.

I cut some little squares from the remnants left over from the flower petals to add to the centres of the stamped geometric shapes for further interest. Nothing goes to waste here...I do love the small elements of detail.

I started looking at how the shapes from both sets worked together and how different the outcomes were from those printed on scrap pieces of old gel print papers in comparison to those printed onto the fabrics.  I much preferred the fabric printed petal shapes because there was more contrast. I also loved the frayed edge elements that were starting to happen just from handling them, so I guess in a way, they could be considered almost organic just in the way they were changing through using them. 

A few photos had been previously transferred onto some of the scrap dyed fabrics using gel medium so I thought it might be fun to incorporate them...for those of you who are familiar with my work...did you already spot my Great Auntie Lil making another appearance? I needed to add a smidge more water on her to remove a little more paper backing to reveal her image to make her less grey papery...it's a fine line between rubbing too hard and removing too much image and not taking enough backing away to reveal the image fully. I find it best to do it in small stages.

I started looking at how the collage was going to evolve and which bits I would place where.  I find that taking photos of choices are helpful as you can flip back and forth between them to help you decide. I liked both options below, so that made for a difficult choice! In the end I chose the green stamped material on the sunset beach as I liked the little pop of white stitched material against the edges.

Great Auntie Lil was dressed up with a little bit of lace... 

Little accents of lace and stitching were added to bring continuity throughout the work...

To add further interest to the collaged piece I added further stitching, sticking to colours of a similar palette, and little snippets of thread that had frayed from the material edges. I also glued the scrap fabric flower stem on.

My final touch was adding a few scraps of the used fabrics to the little box using a bulb pin. I thought the box just cried out for a little fun element.

It makes me happy to give leftovers a second chance at being included in a piece of art.

It was good to have some 'over prepared pieces' from a previous project to work with that were sitting in a pile on the workbench, as well as using up some of my little bitty bits of scraps from my stash...I do find it cathartic having a scrap busting splurge! Grabbing leftovers can feel like some of the hard work is already done and the fun is about to begin when colours and shapes just jump out at you from the piles and work beautifully together. I am, and was, drawn to using colours and shapes that were similar in this project; I now have intentions of applying this collaged stitched piece onto the hard front cover of my large journal.

I particularly enjoyed the 'patchwork' piecing of materials together and the layered fusion of materials and paper; I can definitely see me doing much more of this! I liked the way the seams of the shirt worked on the edges, but cannot believe I didn't free motion embroider the stem as I often do on my flower pieces; I will be heading back out to the workshop later to do just that!

I do think, if I wanted to add more, I would be likely to choose more textiles...using scrap threads mounted on a felt and scrap base to free motion and fuse it all together with free motion embroidery and then apply it to Great Auntie Lil's skirt...that in turn may spark adding the same technique to another area...or maybe some stencilled numbers or a phrase. 

Thank you for reading right to the end and I look forward to seeing/hearing about how you use your leftover pieces and if you try the Infusions Dye Stain over gesso to get some deep contrasts.

Happy creating,

Floss x

Facebook: floss_workshop.art

Instagram: floss_workshop.art

Website: www.flossworkshopart.com

I am teaching mixed media in-person classes in small groups of up to six in my workshop in East Sussex UK. You can find the class details on the website link above.   

2022 Topic 09: Leftovers {by Nikki Acton} with Tracy Scott stamps

Hi everyone, it's Nikki here with you today and I'm here to share with you a small book of collaged pages using up my leftovers.

Like many of us, I have lots of leftovers, there is the box under the desk from when I last had a tidy and then there are the boxes and piles on the desk of more recent 'leftovers'! I got quite organised recently, having a leftovers tin for die cuts, one for materials and ribbon and one for for paper / prints. I decided collage had to be the way forward..... but the little book idea evolved as I created.

I collated my leftovers to see what I had! Paper tends to be printed paper and leftover gel prints. If you have read one of my posts before you may know I often make more backgrounds than I need - just in case !!

I selected some prints, and scrapbook paper scraps that I thought might work together..... 

 

 

I noticed that the blue/grey prints and the black prints were leftovers from previous PaperArtsy blog posts - so it seemed a good idea to use these! If you are interested, the links to the original projects are here:

Mark Making Subtle or Bold - March 2020

Shaving Foam - Making it Grungy - November 2019

 

I cut these down to A7 size and added some random stamping...I cut about 10 pieces and began working on them in pairs.

 

I started with some of the 'shaving foam technique' leftovers. I collaged some torn gel plate leftovers and strips of printed paper to start.

This dark background needed some colour so I took a Tracy Scott stencil PS224 and sponged some PaperArtsy Fresco Chalk Acrylic - in Mermaid to one area of each card.

 

At some point during collaging my cards I decided that triangles (Tracy Scott stamp set - TS054) were going to be the theme that ran through each one.

 

Some scraps from my material box and die cuts were added along with some punched mini circles.

Tracy Scott stencil PS224 and stamp set TS054 were used on all pages to bring some cohesion or a theme to the different collaged pages.

There are four pairs of pages in the concertina book. Another example uses the blue/grey/grey gel print leftovers as the start point.

Some collaged paper added, including book paper - but then I got brave! I used PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic - Little Black Dress to cover some areas.

 

 

Using the the same stencil and Mermaid paint I added stencilling over these areas - not worrying how perfect it was. I also toned down some the collaged elements by dry brushing with PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic - Chalk.

 

The triangles once again form the focal point - with some ink died ,frayed calico added

On each of the pairs there is some stamping with Tracy Scott's marking making stamp set - TS065. Here you can see the crosses stamped with paint and the larger numbers stamped with archival ink.

The last couple of pairs followed the pattern - but using the triangles in a different way each time and varying the collaged leftovers. 

Here you can see the front of the concertina book when it is tied together.

 

The fabric layers on the final pair include hessian, dried coffee bags, some handmade paper scraps and twine.

 

With each page complete I adhered to the concertina base. 4 on the front, 4 on the back. I used some ink-stained seam binding to tie it all together.

I really wasn't sure where I was going when I started this project. Once I started simply; small bases, adding layers - it evolved. So often the ideas come as we create, rather than before we create. Don't let a lack of ideas / over thinking stop you making - just start and see what happens.

Nikki

Blog: Addicted to Art

Instagram: @a2a.craft

Pinterest: nikacton

YouTube: Nikki Acton