Round Robin pages for Dianne

I've scheduled this post. It is a color post, not a What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday post. In fact, this doesn't look anything like my desk today, since this is from a couple of weeks ago. Today, I'm biting the bullet and visiting various places in town to try to find shelving for the north wall in my basement studio. The problem is, the shelving I can get from a box is too tall and deep, but not wide enough, for the recessed area I need the shelving for. So, I may have to look at custom shelves, if I can't find something that is the size I need. As much as this pains (and aggravates and even angers) me, I can't move forward on my basement or get the furniture out of my kitchen, until I get some shelves. And sadly, I can't buy shelves if I'm sitting in front of my computer.

But now let's turn our attention to these color pages. This month my color round robin pages went to Dianne at Art Beneath the Cottonwoods. Now that Dianne has her pages, I can show you these and how I made a couple of them. I have to thank Dianne because she stepped in when one of the original players dropped out of the group.


Dianne's colors were red, hot pink, and yellow. Bright, vivid colors are what Dianne wanted. I fear she didn't get as much hot pink as she would have liked, since I had no hot pink, only fluid acrylic magenta, which I tried to turn into bright (but not hot) pink with titan buff. You can see this was my color palette. You can also see I'm not much of a pink gal.

I began with three little girls I got as a freebie from Terri at Pringle Hill Studio. It's the same image I used in a spread for Gina Wise last year.


I had intended to show intermediate steps, but forgot. Instead you see the finished piece with red, pink, and yellow paint swiped over the three little girls, over which I added a red pigment inked rubber stamp. Yes, I stamped!


For the reverse side, I used the same red inkpad and my Fornasetti female stamp. I stamped and cut the image, then realized I cut one edge uneven. I also freehand cut a heart, over which I sewed a piece of dyed wet wipe. I brought out some red feathers and another wet wipe.


Next, I sewed the wet wipe to the background, then placed the pieces I had already completed, trying to find a decent layout. Nope, this wouldn't do. After all, Dianne's pages were really TINY compared to what I'm used to working with.


This looked a bit better because I had now added a few more bits of collage fodder. At this point, nothing was attached, not even the feathers behind the face.


After a bit more trial and error, I came up with the final design. I added the ribbon on the left to hide the fact I sewed my wet wipe crooked. And because I put it on crooked, I used that space to add my initials and the date. I glued this page of card stock to the watercolor paper I used for the first side. I just hope the added lace doesn't interfere with Dianne's flag book she will be adding these tip-ins to.


I started this second page by coloring watercolor paper red on one side and pink on the other (see photo below). When I think of red and yellow, I think Asia. So of course, I had to go with that look for this second set of pages. I used various joss papers in the background. I tried to cover the gold with yellow paint, but it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. The statue is from a travel brochure to China


For the back side, I started with a pink background. Again, I never got what I would call hot pink. But I was especially lucky to find a bride and groom in traditional wedding garb that fit the color scheme I was going for. The background papers are the same ones used on the front of this spread. I sewed the backgrounds together, added a tiny red jewel to the bride's dress, and hung lanterns to honor the wedding celebration.


I like to make my sign-in tags using similar concepts and materials as I used on the pages I make. For this tag, I began with direct to paper (DTP) using red pigment ink, which turned into a nice two toned pink, but again, NOT hot pink. I added the images I got at a Vietnamese store. The page was lovely, and I nearly saved it for my own Asian book, but decided to share the beauty of the yellow and red piece. I also stamped a butter fly collage on card stock and added it after I used some dimensional texture paste through a stencil.



And this is the back with my personal information and a bingo marker. However, none of it is confidential, so I didn't bother wiping anything out.

I enjoyed working with these colors, because although my swap colors are vintage-y (rust and white), I really like bright colors, too. Have a great day.