Carving out a niche

I have been doing various types of art and craft for over 10 years now, starting with card making and rubber stamping before moving on to mixed media art. However, I'm not sure I'm any closer to finding my niche, the technique or style that is really me and where I have something special to add. Maybe it does't matter as long as I'm enjoying it, and its always good to try new things, right? Still I can help feeling like I'm a little lost sometimes.

My latest techniqe is lino cutting. I last tried this as a school kid doing GCSE graphic design (20 years ago!!), so I've been quite pleased how well my first few attempts have gone.

I found carving a soothing process, at least once the fiddly bits were done.

Here are a couple of mothers day cards I made using the larger hare design. The background was a done with a gel plate print (acrylics and stencils).

I'm still working on how to get nice clear prints, but that will come with practice I'm sure.

Bye for now,

Sarah xx 

Gelli and Stencils

Hi there, 

My lovely husband got me a Gelli Plate for my birthday a couple of months ago. Its so much fun to play with that I have made loads of prints, but haven't actually used many of them. The piece I want to show you started off as a print using acrylic paints (Sennelier Abstract Blue and DecoArts Media Quinacridone Violet) with an Andy Skinner stencil.

Looking for something to do with the print, I spotted a new sketch book and thought the print would make a lovely cover image.

I edged it using black neopastel, which mirrored the lovely rough texture of the print then added more layers of stencilling with neopastel and archival ink through some Crafters Workshop stencils (I love the Rebekah Meier ones!). Simple, but quite effective I think.

I'm going to enter this in the Thats Crafty 'stencils and masks' challenge and also a stencils challenge on the Mixed Media World blog which I have only just discovered.

Thanks for visiting, I hope to have more to show you soon.

Sarah xx