I am very proud of myself – I have remembered the reason I started this blog and have now taken photos of three journal pages – not to mention the half dozen or so photos of cards that are now on Orlando’s pinterest page!  My photography skills are questionable, but I am thinking that if I keep at it I have to get better, so now I am keeping the camera ready to go, on the table at all times. [I’m also following KBT’s advice and trying for shots in the morning light]  It appears to be a good thing to do as  I snapped a photo of Orlando watching the latest antics of Maru on You Tube through the TV screen yesterday morning.  He was sitting up tall and straight and blinking furiously and warbling at him in a friendly kind of a manner as Maine Coons do [they are on the whole very chatty in a non-annoying kind of way] hoping to get the cat’s attention and have a new friend……. so cute!!

[Maru’s ears are back as he’s just realised the water has got his tail!]

But that’s not why we are here.  Back to the page you are about to see.

I follow a couple of great artists on You Tube Claudia Rossi  and France Papillon both are really inspiring and have great videos – France regularly and Claudia now and again.  You will find them by just typing their names into the YT search engine.

I’ve been playing with a theme of ‘happy houses’ for some years now – I used to paint smallish canvases with individual houses or groups of them – all slightly wonky and looking very happy and pleased with themselves.  All the canvases sold and I never took photos of them.  When I saw Claudia’s journal page of houses a few months back, I decided to have a go too.  A chance to move from working with paint alone into mixed media with a familiar theme.    I didn’t feel brave enough to stay with my original style working in such a confined space as a journal page so I pretty much copied what I remembered seeing in her tutorial.

I sprayed the top half of the pages liberally with Dylusions in shades of blues and purples and the bottom half in yellows.  I used a mask to create the full moon and stars, a white gel pen to outline the moon and stars and a Tim Holtz stamp supplied the curve of birds across the face of the moon.

The houses were cut from card which I had coloured with a two or three shades of Tim Holtz stains and then dry embossed with one of my favourite embossing folders which features a woodgrain on one side and brickwork on the other.  I think it’s a Spellbinders.

I cut out the window shapes, attached some tracing paper and scrawled in the dividing lines and the window frames with a Sharpie.  The doors were made using left over scraps of paper from the ‘scraps’ drawer.

I ran a ton of red stained card through the die cutter using a narrow lace die and layered them on top of each other, cut to roof type shapes and bunged ’em down on top of the house rectangles.  .

The fence was added in and the little flowers were also used as they had been annoyingly sitting around for years and I needed to use them up once and for all!

Voila – light filled houses on a moonlit night!

Thanks for stopping by ~ and have a very happy day!