2013 DIY Calendar Pages

Here are a few more of my calendar pages.  I've been making calendars for family and friends for years.  I started out with pretty simple stamping techniques and it's fun to look back and see how my style has changed over time. One thing's for sure - I'm much more adventurous.   This year I played more with backgrounds and collage techniques and used stamping more as part of the background and less as the main event.  I'm having fun playing with bits of paper and composition this year.

 

I used pieces of blue and green scraps for this page with a bird stamped and cut out of grunge paper.  I love how grunge paper just soaks up color.  

 

 

This page started with one of those artist papers in The Somerset Studio magazines.  I added some scraps, a strip of Tim Holtz tape and the stamped bird. 

 

 

The Pink Page was inspired by Randel Plowman's book, The Collage Workbook.  I love this book - full of ideas to jump-start the process and technical help without overwhelming detail for those of us with limited attention spans.  As a bonus, there are great images you can use in your own work.

 

One of the book's ideas is to make a collage using only one color.  Pink isn't one of my go-to colors, but while you're stretching yourself, might as well go all out! Once the scraps were glued down, I washed  diluted white acrylic paint over the pages to and then splattered  dark pink ink over them.  Added some bottle-cap circles stamped with white acrylic paint and the flower image cut out of  a gadening book.

 

 

 

I'm not a fan of winter, so this is my "Hopeful" page for spring.  I glued bits of paper around the border of a painted and stamped page, then washed over them with some diluted green acrylic paint.  I swiped the edges with a white paint dauber to make a border.  I stamped the tulip onto tissue paper, colored it with pencils and then glued it to the background.

 

Happy 2013!

 

(I'm not sure what's going on with Blogger and highlighting random words that link to annoying ads!   I've tried going back and retyping them, but can't remove all the links.The only link I added was to the collage book.    If anyone knows how to stop this "feature", please let me know.  I'll be checking in with Blogger again !)

 

** PSA Update - According to Blogger help, these pesky links are the work of nasty add ons.  They suggested disabling any suspicious add ons by opening Internet Explorer, click on tools, click manage add - ons, select see-all and then disable any that look suspicious.  I only had two that looked suspicious and both were for links that had shown up in my posts.  I didn't (and don't recommend) disabling anything with recognizable site names - like Microsoft, Adobe, etc.).  Hope this fixes this annoying intrusion into my posting.