/* */ Beulah Bee: postage stamp
Showing posts with label postage stamp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postage stamp. Show all posts

February 13, 2023

Kansas

Most times, my inspiration for tag-making starts with a vintage photo that speaks to me somehow. I'm never sure where I'll end up but usually that voice gives me an idea on how to proceed. This one said, "Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore."

It began as a vintage postcard that I trimmed and pasted to give it the standard tag dimensions. Then I applied an image transfer of the photo (technique here) and used thin washes of acrylic paint for color.

I knocked-back a portion of the postmark where it covered the dress with transparent white, used glitter on the corsage and shoes and added the appropriate text cut from a book page.

Most tags look better with a border, this one is washi-tape. Since it was too wide, I taped it to my cutting mat, used an X-Acto knife to cut smaller strips and (as is always the case) it was still sticky enough to be reapplied to the tag.

I'm linking up to Simon's Monday challenge, "Frame It."

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

September 25, 2022

Elizabeth II

Who could not be moved by the most honorable life of Queen Elizabeth II? With respect to her passing, Simon's prompt this week is "Sparkle and Shine" and she certainly was all that and so much more.

"May flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest."

 

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

September 21, 2022

Ethical Skeptics

Sharing a mixed media collage today whose base is a vintage portrait folder combined with cuttings from scraps of Paper Stash. A vintage postcard (1915) creates another layer and includes an image transfer of a vintage photo that took my fancy. The text is also an image transfer and the borders were embellished with Nuvo Crystal Drops.

Just in case you are wondering:

praedicate evidentia – hyperbole in extrapolating or overestimating the preponderance of evidence supporting a specific claim (even to convention), when few examinations of merit have been conducted regarding a hypothesis, or few or no such studies of the subject have indeed been conducted at all.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

November 11, 2021

Christmas Tag No. 1 for 2021

 

Making Christmas tags by following along with Tim Holtz blog posts way back when was such great fun and I've continued to embrace the tag format ever since.

Nowdays, I use my holiday tags to decorate gifts and today I'm sharing the first one of, hopefully, twelve for this year. (See previous seasons here).

I punched postage-stamp shapes from a heat-embossed stamped image (Penny Black Tree of Holly) and pasted rows of them to create a background.

 

The poinsettia was stamped (Penny Black Christmas Star), tinted with Distress inks, cut-out and mounted to the surface. I added some fine, black lines for detail and used gold Stickles to trim the flower edges along with my last bottle of Rock Candy Distress Stickles (an absolute favorite product, sadly discontinued).

 

I stamped then fussy-cut the text (Penny Black Festive Season) and trimmed the tag with Nuvo Glitter Drops, sketchy pen ink and a ribbon topper.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

October 24, 2021

Strange Rumors

An image transfer, book text/paper, postal scraps, along with paper and rub-ons from Tim Holtz are the ingredients used to make this piece. I've also used Simon's dot stencil with texture paste, Scribbles (3D-paint) and inks for tinting. And I've completed it just in time to link-up with Simon's Halloween challenge!

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.


April 23, 2021

Postcard

 

A postcard (from the edge?).... Expressing my feelings about events of the world we find ourselves in makes me appreciate the motivation behind artworks from other tumultuous times.

I took the back of a vintage postcard, added image transfers (window, birds), clipped Found Relatives, stamping (Tim Holtz Mail Art and Correspondence), tinting with markers and typewritten text.


 

If you're not familiar with my image transfer technique, here's a step-out I posted for your reference.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

February 21, 2021

Non-Zoonotic

Postcard

This image of a cactus was altered after printing by outlining the stems with a black ink marker and adding hints of yellow-green before it was fussy-cut. Then it was pasted over a thinned-out page of Abandoned paper stash and mounted on one-half of a vintage portrait folder.

The edges were distressed and it includes stamped text and postmark (Correspondence), a vintage postage stamp and typewriter text.

I'm linking up with Simon's Monday challenge "Add Some Texture." Nothing has more texture than a gigantic cactus--am I right!?

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

July 02, 2020

Happy Heart


"Take Me for a Ride" is the challenge at Simon Says Stamp this week so I altered this photo by creating an image transfer on a manila tag.


Then I used watered-down gesso to cover most areas with a small paint brush, applied a mask cut from deli paper and used a background stamp on the car's surface.

I used inks to tint the photo, applied some stamped tissue paper on the right-hand side, placed some vintage postage stamps in the lower corner and the text is a Remnant Rub

This tag reminds me of one I made last year (Maurice Crooks) which is a favorite of mine.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

December 08, 2019

12 Tags for Christmas 2019 - Christmastide


We've had a really rainy weekend here in the desert which made for a good time to get cozy in the craft room and make another Christmas tag.

I was channeling a vintage vibe with this one and used a page from an old German bible along with some fussy-cut paper from Graphic 45.


It was embellished with glitter glue, Glossy Accents and machine stitching and I used my typewriter for the text. I needed something to fill-in the bottom area and used a Stamp Collector stamp (Tim Holtz).

There's time to link yet again to Simon's Monday challenge for this week's "Let's Sparkle" theme.

October 01, 2019

Happy Birthday Thelma


Thelma (my good friend who got me started stamping) has a BIG milestone birthday coming up and this is the card I made for her.

Nothing ground-breaking to talk about technique-wise but I would like to mention the flower garland because it was hand-drawn by me after a few simple lessons from the queen of coloring books--Johanna Basford. She has a new book coming out this month that teaches her drawing methods.

I gave the garland some color with my Polychromos then cut it out and pasted it onto scrapbook paper.


The cardstock I mounted it on couldn't be a standard card size so I found some really great instructions here for how to make an envelope in ONE MINUTE. Really!

Then I decorated the envelope using inspiration from Kristina Werner and realize I need more interesting postage stamps for the next time I do this. (No pics for privacy reasons.)

I wonder if the post office would mind if I used a real stamp along with some fake ones like these? I'll have to try it and then let you know.

August 19, 2019

Most Noble


I discovered some wonderful paper over the weekend made by Stamperia called Oriental Garden. I found an image of a woman to transfer with gel medium (thanks, British Library), then stamped postal and architectural images onto tissue paper and pasted together a collage tag.

I'm excited to see what other things I can make using this paper!

April 12, 2019

Maurice Crooks


My Great Aunt Esther took a photo of a neighbor whose family was homesteading in Newcastle, Wyoming. She wrote his name and the date on the back--Maurice Crooks, August, 1921.

I made a copy of that photo and used gel medium to transfer the image onto a manila tag.


Then I used gesso to white-out some areas, blending the edges of the photo into the background.


Then I went about stamping and tinting and embellishing and came up with what you see here.


I know it's best not to put the focal point of a composition directly in the middle, but in this case, I threw caution to the wind since Maurice seemed to stand so proudly right in the middle of his family's meager garden.

I'm linking to Simon, the Monday challenge is "Down on the Farm."

October 03, 2018

One-Cent Flora


I hope to make several tags this week and link-up to Simon's Monday challenge because I love to make tags. If you haven't seen my flipcard blog, manilaguerilla.blogspot.com, it's where I file them and you can change the view to any format you like (the "Mosaic" view is pretty cool, too).

This tag is clean and simple and here's what I used to make it: Prima Epiphany paper, Idea-ology Aviary collage paper, and stamps by Heidi Swapp and Tim Holtz.

This is the first time using the Aviary paper and the birds are a little blurry/fuzzy. I don't know if this is by design (Tim does like the distressed look) or if I just got a less than perfect batch and I wish the images were sharper. Even so, I love this new paper (I already have the Botanical and Plain versions) and I highly recommend it if you like to do collages.

September 29, 2018

Simply Discover


You'd think working in monochrome would be easy--yes? I have found it to be easier said than done.

And so, for this week's linkup to Simon's Monday challenge, I took the easy way out and went with a black and white theme.

It started with a background paper (Paper Studio B/W Abstract), layered under a page trimmed for the base from Prima called Epiphany.

The luna moth was printed from some clip art then cut-out and pasted and embellished with gray paint and black and white pens (Sakura gelly rolls and Pitt big brushes).

There's a little washi tape, some Remnant Rubs, and a stamp from a set by Tim Holtz called Stamp Collector.

One of my favorite tools used for the black shading around the moth is a Derwent Sketching pencil--Dark Wash 8B.

September 04, 2018

The Beekeeper's Daughter


I've made a Vignette Tray assemblage/collage to share with you today. I chose the smaller tray size and used whiting (a wood stain) and some light sanding to alter the surface. This technique is known as "pickling."

I used this finish on a CHA 2017 project and here's the link if you'd like to see another example.


A Found Relative was cut-out and placed between a sandwich of two Baseboard Frames and vintage book paper of a blue sky was attached to the back.

The background consists of the stained wood of the tray along with vintage book paper text.

The large white script was made using a home-made stencil and white paint on Plain Collage Paper.

By using the collage paper, I have lots more control over where it's placed and after pasting down it becomes almost invisible.


The tiny bee on top is an image transfer on the backside of a vintage button (I filled in the holes with paste medium).

The sunburst is also a transfer and the image came from a Trader Joe's flyer.

The gentlemen were cut from French Industrial paper stash and there's also a vintage postage stamp.


The flowers were cut from the Wallflower paper stash and that's an Idea-ology key dabbed with white paint and dark ink to distress it.

The honeycomb was made with a Tim Holtz Mixed Media thinlet.

This piece was a long-time in the making and there were several versions before I finalized it.

Funny thing, though--I ended up returning to my original idea. I guess I needed to try out all the possibilities before I could fully embrace the design.

July 16, 2018

Tell Your Story


Hours have gone by with no end in sight. A work in progress just won't come together and I needed a break. So, I made a tag with random bits from previous pieces and I feel better now.

It's a lesson in remembering to let go of control, to trust your instincts and to embrace the process instead of the end result.

July 04, 2018

May 29, 2018

Extra Ordinary Joy


Embracing the old and the new and some extra-ordinary joy with this tag, made on-the-fly today because I could and I did.

I have a lot of side-projects going on related to reorganizing my crafting space. Like converting some favorite wooden stamps to cling now that I have a stamping platform. I tested one of them today (French Collage) using a Big & Juicy stamp pad (remember these?) on a manila tag. And I just couldn't leave well enough alone. So....

I curated a Found Relative (the latest release has new images) and fussy-cut it like I used to before there were Paper Dolls.

I cut out some images from a newly purchased stamp set called Stamp Collector, then foraged around for more paper bits and found the leaf/vine cutting and the polka dot paper (I save most of my scraps).

Put it all together with a glue stick, add some Remnant Rubs and Scribbles (the dotted border) and there you have it. Extra Ordinary Joy!

February 07, 2018

Feeling Noteworthy


The bird's crown is a Remnant Rub. Many of the older rubs have been discontinued. I am unhappy about that because I find them so useful. So I have no other choice but to hoard them.

Anyway, today my intention was to make a valentine-themed tag but I veered off-course (a good excuse to try again later) and made this tag instead.


The botanical bits came from an older 7 Gypsies paper collection called Conservatory. A vintage Germania postage stamp, scraps from a book page and yes, more Remnant Rubs (don't get me started) were also used.

I thought I'd speak a bit about my dotted border. As I use this decorative element quite often, I have a few tips in case you want to give it a go. I prefer Scribbles which is a dimensional fabric paint but also use Liquid Pearls.

When applying, don't touch the applicator tip to the paper as you will get a splotch instead of a dot. Rather, gently squeeze some out from the tip and delicately touch only the drop/paint to the paper then pull it away. Don't worry if it peaks a little, it will settle as it dries.

If you goof-up (and you will, it's inevitable)--fear not. Just keep a toothpick handy and scrap off the mistake as best you can. Then move on. Keep dotting ahead. Afterwards, you can go back to the boo-boo and use a knife to scrape away the dried bits that might still be there. Then put your new dots back in. I had two areas on this tag that I had to re-do and no one (except you) will ever know.

January 11, 2018

Raised by Wolves

Photo is by Bernd Heyden

Collage is an interesting art form. Disparate images pieced together that hopefully, speak to the viewer in some way. Sometimes, the hardest part for me is knowing when to quit so I just go with my gut. I guess that's what everyone does.

A lot of my collages are dependent on what I have lying around at the moment that I grab and decide to include. It is a game of sorts and play has a lot to do with it. "I wonder what this will look like if I put it here?" is the ongoing conversation I have with myself.

So today, may I share another journal page/collage that started from a photo by Bernd Heyden that I was compelled to use. Raised by wolves? You may guess what band I was listening to while making it.

I'm linking to Simon's Monday Challenge Blog, this week's theme is "Winter Blues."