Add Character To Envelopes

I love decorating envelopes before mailing them to people.
I try to keep the decorations simple and quick to do so that if they get damaged in the mail, it's no big deal :-)

Here's an example of one I made recently before sending to a friend who likes blues, turquoises and spirals:

On a piece of paper, I used stamping ink pads for the coloured background, silver pen for the spirals and silver star stickers leftover from my holiday sticker garland project.  Then I glued the piece of paper to the envelope with a gluestick, trimmed the edges, taped the envelope closed and addressed the other side.   All set to go!
It was quick, easy and fun and I hope that it will brighten some postal worker's day.



I try to re-use and re-purpose as much as possible.  The piece of paper was scrap from the recycling bin and the envelope was re-used (hence my needing to tape it closed :)
☺

Grunge Star Rubbed Impression Page with Ink Pads and Cereal Box Stars

Did you save the shapes you cut out from the cereal box template project?
If not, you may end up cutting out shapes just to make fun pages like this one!

How To:

Lay a piece of thinner paper (ie printer paper) on a totally flat surface.

Take a stamp ink pad and lightly rub it and drag it around the page until you like how it looks.  *If you have an almost dried out ink pad this will be very easy.
All of mine are newer and the trick to prevent big blotches is to have the pressure so light there's almost none... and keep it moving!*

Repeat with as many colours as you like - preferably working from lighter to darker if you care about contaminating the lighter pads with darker colours.

When you like how it looks, take your cereal box shapes and lie them under the paper.

Take an ink pad of a darker colour (or the same as the most dark you have used so far) and rub over top of the paper in the area of the edges of the shapes until you like how it looks!

So simple and easy!

In the basic image above I just used 2 colours and only used the cereal box shapes on the final layer but you can play around to make this much more saturated, with shapes on various layers like this:

It only takes minutes to do but be warned - it's so much fun it can be addictive!
Now I just need a project to use these pages... which I will likely have way too many of soon :-)

If you do something like this and post on your blog or site, please let me know in the comments!  I'd love to share the links for readers.

Collaged Sketchbook Cover, Art Journal Page Backgrounds

After using it for a while, I decided that the plain brown cover of my ecojot sketchbook was crying out to be made colourful!
Here's the result... which I will likely add more to over time:

And here are a few glimpses of what's inside.

This page was intended to be a background for art journalling but when it was done, I liked it so much that I couldn't write on it!  So I added a little piece in the centre and it stands alone.

Techniques used include dragging dye-based ink pads across the paper, shading in white parts with chalk pastels, border made with a rubber stamp and then coloured in with pens and markers.  The background of the centre piece is made by lightly turning an ink pad in a complete circle.  The idea for using ink pads on background came from the wonderful post Creating Colorful Journal Pages by Aimee of Artsyville.  I am in love with her vibrant blog!  You can also see a video that shows this technique and a few more here:  Art Journal Page Backgrounds

Done on a piece of paper and glued into sketchbook.
The above page was done when I was using wetter background techniques... which caused the thin paper to warp.  I've come up with a great technique that avoids this problem and will post about it soon.
Yet another piece where I suddenly found I didn't want to fill in the sky with words.  Though I did write in metallic pen on the bottom part.
Alphabet stamps found at a dollar store.  Tree stamp was purchased, bird stamp was hand carved from a vinyl eraser (so much fun!).  If flipped around, it can stamp waves/water :-)