Embroidered Collage

I made this collage for an imaginary lands round robin booklet.  The papers started out as scrapbook papers meant to look like fanciful marbles and stones.  I liked the extra texture that patterning provided.  I added a castle and assorted details with colored pencil.

I loved the paper made by Christine Hennig for Melissa's paper swap so much that I had to create collages from it almost immediately.  It was a gel medium transfer of a forest scene onto a lightweight speckled paper with some section torn and collaged and also glitter added.  All four of the above pieces use part of this paper and I still have some scraps left over for something else.  The long skinny piece is a deco page for Kirsten for a birthday group.  The other three, two 5x7x and a 4x4, will be posted for sale at my etsy shop sometime this week.

The pieces started out as simple collage, but then I embellished them with colored pencil and a little stitching. One has a velvet leaf and some beads.  Two more have little hammered metal squiggles that I bought from Stephanie Distler in her etsy shop.  The colored pencil doesn't really show up in images this size, but it adds a great deal more depth to each piece, which pleases me.  Except that it is obviously only one layer, no matter how many colors I mix in.  I think I'll be trying to add a painted layer of an acrylic glaze as well in some future pieces and see what that does.

Colored pencil does not work nearly as well over gloss gel medium coated collages as it does over matte gel medium coated collages.  I have found this out the hard way and am a little frustrated as I put less work into a few deco pages than I'd intended to.  I thought this one turned out well though, even without that additional layer.

Baseball season has started and my husband's watching that instead of movies.  I like baseball, but it's easier to go in and out of the room, so I'm trying to spend at least half an hour to an hour of each game cleaning and organizing all my art stuff, and some other things in the house as well.  I really want to know just what I have.  I'm also trying to clean out a huge pile of decos, since I want to cut my involvement there by a good chunk.  My original goal was to work on pieces for sale at the same time but so far that hasn't been going too well.  I'll keep trying though.

My spread for an Imaginary Lands RR.  Not what I'd intended to do for it.  But it's what's on my mind, that's for sure.  Bleary, rambling, cranky.  Hopefully it's almost over...

Some deco pages I did today.

Just a few of my recent decos pages.  I've done three times this many or more since my last pic post, but these are a few of my favorites.

The first one is alphanumeric and I had fun layering the different characters, but it still looked rather not done until my eye lit on the Building Permit collage image and the splash of yellow was perfect.  The button deco page is simple, but is making me want to go out and get that next color of acrylic ink I've been promising myself.  I finally used some of the images I've been getting from the Dover free samples newsletter to do an Egypt page for a free expression deco.  I have to keep remembering to look in that folder.