fairies

My buddy, Beth (http://bethleintz.typepad.com/gathering_dust/), the Ebay guru, came by today and helped me start listing on Ebay!!! She patiently walked me through each step and gave me advice for a couple of hours. (did I tell you she was a very good friend?) Since I closed my showroom in June, I have been telling people I was going to start selling on Ebay, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.  At first, I was "taking the summer off."  Well, honey, summer is long gone and I just might have stretched my vacation to the breaking point.  Time to get back to work!

Here is one of my listings, it is a Fairy Cottage.  I am trying to do a variety of items, jewelry, fairy homes, fairies, artist trading cards. I will have cottage style antiques, garden signs, paintings, and other goodies coming up. Wish me luck!

Beth even showed me how to put a link from this blog to the Ebay sales and visa-versa.  Take a look if you’d like to, by clicking on the link in the top right column of this site.

After we listed things, we sat and played with papers.  She was making tags with cool old dress patterns, I was making artist trading cards with some of the vintage paper items I had added hand painted fairy wings too.  Here is one, titled: Delight of Earth. 

On my junking day last week with friends, I found sepia photos for 50 cents each, so bought a dozen of the cutest for projects.  This little girl was already as cute as she could be, but with that elfish smile, I thought she should be a fairy.  I liked her so much, I painted all of the "new" old photos into fairies. 

How To Hints: I used acrylic craft paint, glitter glue, gold pulver, chalk, and distress ink with artist paint brushes and cosmetic sponges

Ink and chalk are great for tinting in areas where you want to see through to the original picture, such as I did on the hair, stockings, and pants.

Craft paint is opaque, but doesn’t tend to want to stick.  Build up layers slowly on the large painted areas like the wings.  I used a cream color (never pure white, it is too  much of a contrast against the sepia) and painted the wing shapes, then did about 4 coats of the cream letting it dry in between.

Once I had a base ready for the wings, I used pink and yellow to color them in and outlined them in brown/black together with a fine brush. 

The flowered and stripe shirt and antennas were done without having to build up like the wings.  I used acrylics again and just made dots and lines.  No base coats were necessary since it was only simple strokes and was just gone over once. 

Buttons are dots of glitter glue with gold pulver sprinkled on to the wet glue.

More Sugarwings- Little Leandra has such a sweet little fairy face, no wonder I can’t stop making spritely pictures of her.  I am keeping an artist journal/photo album of my fairy grandbaby and today I made these 2 collages of her.

I used a blue paper background with a border of vines cut out of the newspaper this weekend. With colored markers, I tinted the border and then added floral stickers, rhinestones and glitter.

Lee Lee’s cut out photo was tucked into  the edge of the vine border and I added butterfly wings from a vintage booklet that has been a wonderful fairy wing source for me.  The wings got a bit of tinting from the markers I used on the background, then were sparkled up.  I added a few more flowers from a page of vintage die cuts and then drew antennas and added some flower stickers to make a wreath on her head.  Of course, those flowers got a hint of glitter too.

And when is one of anything enough?  A photo of her in a more mellow mood got a pastel rose background, wings cut out of handmade paper and thoroughly glittered.  A store bought sticker border was enhanced with more and more glitter, then a swag of pink netting across the top and a sequin row across the bottom.  Her shining crown is cut out of the sticker paper I used for the border, then treated to gold, glitter, sequins, and rhinestones.  "Sugar Wings" (her nickname) is written in gold paint pen and outlined in black sharpie. 

Both of these pages in my album are a mix of vintage, sparkles, and hobby store bits and pieces.  As nice as it would be to make everything from pure vintage goods, there is so much great stuff out there and available to use, I just have to indulge and fill my cart when Michaels or Hobby Lobby has 1/2 price scrap booking sales!

In a completely different vein, here is what I did yesterday.  My sister-in-law invited me over to her home to play decorator.  She had repainted her living room/dining room and had every knick knack and picture piled up in the middle of the room. Our game for the afternoon was to rearrange them all and come up with fun ideas for display.  Here is one, it is an old, glassless, window frame.  We hung it behind the sofa, tacked up a doily in it,  and hung two prints she had found on clearance for $2 each. 

My friend, Beth, and I had a fun day on Thursday cutting and gluing at her house. I made use of some of the vintage prints that I had photocopied last week, ones that I had mentioned in an earlier post, "Fairy Wings and Happy Things."

"Rose" started with a floral stamp on card stock, aged with distressing inks in green and brown.  Next, I glued down a tiny copy of the rose watercolor I found at an antique store in Wichita. Over that, is an even tinier color copy of a pink rose post card.

I drew scrolly designs with a gold paint pen and outlined some in black, glued down a pretty pink ribbon and then scavenged through Beth’s cache of buttons for the perfect embellishment.  To top it all off, I used a diamond glaze to cover the little pink rose post card and make it look like it is under glass.  I had never used the glaze before.  That is what makes playing with papers so much fun at a friend’s house.  You get to experiment with their store of goodies and try things you might not have at home.  But i will be getting some glaze!  I loved the results.  The word, rose, is written on a bit of vintage wallpaper and added to the ribbon.

I also used a spot of the diamond glaze on the charm attached to the soap bottle’s neck.  The label on the bottle is a copy of the Victorian children print that I added wings to.

For my other bathroom, I used a small decanter from Tuesday Morning on sale for $2.99, as a mouthwash bottle after doctoring it up with  a label made of vintage papers hand tinted with colored markers and tied up with a bow of bronze ribbon.  I thought the roses on the paper I chose were a good match to the hand painted ones on the mirror of my vanity. The small trophies are something I picked up at a flea mkt in Ottawa, KS and decided would be a useful collection to hold make up brushes and bathroom whatnots.  I don’t think I have ever earned a trophy in my life, but using these gives me the illusion that I am a winner!

"Had they believed" is another ATC using the same floral stamp as the background of "Rose" then a copy of one of the pictures I hand tinted and added wings to.  Beth also had some bronze colored stamp pads that I used along with the green and brown distressed ink for the background.  Another thing I need to buy, loved the bronze ink!  And of course, I had to delve into her button stash to find another pretty flower shaped one for this card and for the last one: "I will take pleasure."

Once again, I used the nice floral background stamp, but this time, colored it with bright markers in red, orange, and yellow, adding some of those colors to her basket of flowers too.  A little doodle around the edge of the picture in gold and silver, a title glued on, and she was done. 

More collections along the same line, fairies seem to look at home next to vintage cottage prints.  I have collected  these prints for years, since my sister gave me one soon after we had bought this house.  At the time, my yard was inherited from renters who hadn’t mowed or pulled a weed in ages.  Add the major remodeling and the mud that causes and I was horrified by what I saw outside my back door.  The cottage print was a symbol of everything perfect about a garden, lush and full, cozy and inviting.  Of course, I can’t quite establish that look, but I sure try.  In the meantime, I buy a lot of cottage prints, mostly at garage sales for under $2.

Leandra Joy’s room upstairs at my house was redone when she moved out with her parents to a new home.  It became more "grandmotherly", with a big comfy chair for reading to her, a tea party area, and a dress up area (for fairy clothes!).  All of my cottage prints are hanging in her room, with the fairy collection I put together for her.  The 2 fairies under glass are some that I made from old dolls that got repainted and dolled up.

It feels good to be up and out of bed, but hard to get back into the swing of things, a week is a long time to lay around and watch TV and doze.  My main problem now is tendinitis from too much remote control action!

Since I have not done one interesting thing all week, I’m showing something from before I got sick.  Here is a page from the album I did about my mom and her mother. This is her dad, Adelbert.  I love the name and am considering it for my next puppy. 

Grandma’s photo album that she started as a young girl is my basis for this album.  I tried to use it as it was, but discovered, the more I worked with it, the more it crumbled.  So, I had to reinforce all the pages.  I took each page out, and glued varies craft and vintage papers to the old stuff, front and back.  Then, with gel medium, I attached black ribbon along the binding edges to make them really strong before I punched holes in them to string the book back together with the original black shoe lace that Grandma used.

Older pictures and neutral colors are used in the front of the book, and as it goes along, the pictures become newer and the backgrounds brighter.  But I still kept the colors muted, never too modern.  Here are my sisters and I, and then a photo of my mom with me.  (I am the one with the wings)

In the photos of my studio, you could see this painting leaning on a dresser, so I thought I would add a close up of it, so it would show the details more.  I have done this watercolor of Leandra (my grand daughter) at about 4 months old.  Hopefully, it is just the first in a series of fairy portraits of her as she grows up. I’ve  gotten wrapped up in buying, snazzing up, and selling antiques so much over the last few years that I have let my painting slide.  When I sit down to do one, I always love the process and wonder why I don’t do more. 

Today, I am tagging along on a business trip with my husband.  Sometimes I like to take watercolors with me to stay occupied in the hotel room while he works. But this is a short trip, so I will take advantage of my free time to go junking.  I am looking for the perfect old frame for Leandra’s portrait, but who knows what will turn up on a good junking day! 

WATERCOLOR TIPS:

For baby soft skin tones in a portrait, use opaque colors and build up layers.  For Leandra’s skin, I used china white, sky blue, brilliant pink, Juan brilliant, with a touch of yellow ocher and burnt sienna.  By using opaque colors on the flesh and transparent washes on the clothing and wings, a nice contrast is formed that makes the baby’s skin even more believable. I used Thalos for the clothing for that bright splash of color.