A Decorated Box Using Mixed Media
Trash can become a treasure
It was only a small cardboard box but I wanted to take it to the extreme. There’s something extremely satisfying in taking trash and treating it like a treasure. Many times when I draw I miss working with 3-dimensional objects. This time I wanted to enjoy playing with the box and use all its’ sides. Mixed media was the driving factor here too.
Preparation
First removed all the extra tapes from the box surface. Then I covered the box with white gesso. It would give colors better background than brown cardboard.
Inside
I painted the inside panels yellow. It is one of my favorite colors and I often use it when I want to add light but do not want to do that with white. As you may know, I am not a big fan of white!
Plain yellow surface looked little bare so I added some collage elements. These were made by coloring pages from children’s books with color pencils and then randomly cutting circles from the colored areas. I glued the circles with gel medium.
The bottom of the box needed something different. I decided to crochet a piece that would fit inside the box. I began with a small square and crocheted around it using a couple of colors. Finally I finished the pice by embroidering a flower.
At this phase the box reminded me about the sunflowers in the end of the summer. Then I began to decorate the outside of the box.
Outside
I continued with crochet. I made flowers and a long chain which I used in the outside bottom. It feels great to lay the box onto the table when there’s soft wool in the edges!
The I wondered how to attach the decorations like the crocheted flowers and various buttons to the outside edges. They were pretty heavy. Golden Fiber Paste was the perfect stuff! It created the textured surface and attached all the little pieces securely.
The end result is unusual looking but perfect for my indian ink bottles!
Folk Bag with Imagination
I finished this bag in the summer but have been saving this for blogging. Now when the autumn has come to Finland, showing this feels appropriate.
When making this my goal was to create something based on my own style so I created everything myself. All the patterns and ornaments are my own designs.
This bag is inspired by nature in the way many folk style objects were. It also represents the design process where wild plants change to stiff ornaments.
I named the bag after another of my work. This is called Dancing With Imagination because it is so much alike than the art journal page that I made a while ago.
Retro Greeting Card
I am a child of 70s. My mother had mustard yellow painted doors in her kitchen and bright turquoise walls. I spent my early childhood playing on the kitchen floor and looking at the wild patterns of the plastic carpet.
So one evening when remembering all that, I just had to make a very retro greeting card!
Art Journaling Doilies
I haven’t ever been brilliant with watercolors but I have grown to like them very much. Recently I have used them more and more in art journaling. On this page I have used just watercolors, color pencils and markers.
This page tells a story and that’s something I want to increase too: add more text and content to my pages. Here I write about how as a small child I wanted to learn how to crochet. I thought it is a part of good parenting to teach the child to crochet as young as possible! As soon as I learned it I was crocheting like crazy: doll clothes, doilies, clothes, valence curtains … I was the crocheting queen until I started dating and my boyfriend took me to see his family’s summer cottage.
All the textiles in that log cabin were crocheted! Full-sized curtains, bed covers, cushions, table cloths, you name it! His grandmother had done all that. I was speachless. When I met her she told me that a doctor had told her not to crochet anymore as her hands hurt. But as she wanted to do something she had started to learn printing fabric.
The relationship with the boy did not last and the grandmother must have been passed away already but now I know that you do not need to hold the hook to crochet. You can use your pen!