bright birthday plaques for SCS!

turkey day count down!  and a super short week for pezza and hubby too! 

i am cooking here - after a particularly BAD thanksgiving meal at someone else's house when the boys were young they made me promise to never EVER make them eat tday dinner somewhere else so i have been making it ever since - even years when it was just me and the 2 kids i made the whole nine yards!  this year my MIL, FIL and 1 BIL will be coming also.  no drake though BOO!!!!  him and GF both work at Best Buy and will be doing the crushing black friday retail gig.

i did a big batch of cooking this weekend too - split pea soup with sausage and carrots, chicken, rice and gravy, and meatballs with sauce - i made enough for meals now plus 8 full meals and 8 individual sized meals in the freezer!  so nice having back up meals for days when i just can't get to it or when me and pez just feel like having cereal - hubby can't do cereal for dinner.  even better - we are 95% done with our christmas shopping!  i just have two items to make and a few things to get for pezza and a friend's kids.  my kitchen looks like a bomb went off though so i will be working on that this morning when i finish this post!

so i have been feeling a bit lonely in my art journaling/mixed media switch-over lately.  the card making world is so HUGE!  i always participated in the card challenges on SCS and i asked over there about other folks who like this stuff.  well they said card challenges don't really have to be cards!  so i jumped into the challenge that day (friday) and lo and behold it was PERFECT for mixed media (and even hosted by my sweet friend wendybell) - she challenged everyone to use newsprint on their projects.  AWESOME!  i have been wanting to do that for ages and just hadn't gotten around to it.  not only that but i had the perfect thing for it!  I had created some foundations on MDF awhile back and was trying to finish them but i did not like the papers i had tried so far.  turns out newsprint along with some music pages was EXACTLY what i needed to use!

now when i posted these on SCS folks mostly just looked at the pics and didn't read (like i do) and thought they were cards anyway!  one person even thought the party hat was a christmas tree and that i had made a very unconventional christmas card!  but they are actually wood plaques.

i began by painting both boards with pink acrylic paint (gesso first!).  Next i used a sponge to lightly dab on more acrylic paint and Luminarte Silks acrylic glaze (to give them some shimmer!)

Nwxt i took some foam squares from pezza's foam shapes stash and stuck them onto my tack n peel block in a checkerboard pattern and stamped with a bright pink Silks glaze - foam shapes and paint are FAB!  I drew my hat and cupcake and cut them out of the newsprint and music sheets.  i edged them in bright pink and orange Brilliance metallic inksa nd then doodled a bit with a black pen.

i added a bit of a shadow around the edges of the images using my charcoal pencil and a blending stump to smudge it out.

as a finishing touch i added some luscious shimmering orange swirls!  I mixed a bit of Ginger Peach Luminarte Primary Elements into my heavy gel medium and smoothed it on through a stencil.  Some large orange pez-a-bling completed them! 

i still have two more boards to do - i think one will have a pennant banner and the other one a bunch of balloons.  i DO think these would be fun cards - maybe have these pics printed onto card fronts and make like a card collection...?  what do y'all think???

i also discovered something else with my post on SCS - Em over at stamping bella has been getting into art journaling - she has some great stamps out for it and issues a challenge on her blog every tuesday - then she posts the entries on her blog the following tuesday.  the current one is to use your fingers on an art journal page so i have an entry done for that that i will be posting tomorrow along with a tutorial for folks who may want to get into the art journaling thing but have no idea how to start!