Kate Crane Workshop

Hi everyone,

I've had an amazing day last Saturday. I attended an art journaling workshop with Kate Crane at the Craftrange.  Kate was brilliant, generously sharing her techniques, ideas, advice and tips, in addition to letting us leaf through her inspirational journals. And although the class was full there was plenty of space and products galore to try out,  so we weren't scrabbling around looking for specific items or jostling for room.... a couple of my pet hates when attending classes or workshops.

Kate took us through step-by-step tutorials to create two of her journal pages:

Trust me, in comparison to the original pages in Kate's journal, the above pictures look completely flat and lifeless. 

For example in the green page on the LHS,  the butterfly is dimensional and in the other, on the RHS,  there is a  touch of glitter and both pages have border and decorative stitching.  The original pages are stunning, the vibrancy of colour is beautiful and oh sooooo many layers. Oodles upon oodles of them.

Using Art Deco fluid acrylic paints, stamps, stencils, washi tape and a brayer these the three efforts I brought home at the end of the day  ......

Playing more after the workshop, I added a wee bit of stitching on all three pieces and a couple of ceramic tiles from my stash rather than the stamped feathers that Kate used on her green page.

Here are a few close ups:-

The little house was a test piece that Kate brought for us to try out with a crackle medium called Weathered Wood.  First the body of the house was coated in Art Deco Quin. red fluid acrylic paint, then a generous coat  of Weather Wood went on top, followed by Art Deco yellow. 

The Weathered Wood crackle medium only activates and crackles when the second coat of paint is added. In the picture above you can see the Quin. red base coat showing through the crackled yellow top coat......The roof, door and window were just painted with the red. I also stamped the roof with black Archival ink using Kate's Stampotique texture cube stamp before adding a little shading to each roof tile.

A little random doodling with black and white marker pens plus  stamping with France Papillon's crackle stamp (one of my favourites).....

On two of my pages I used Quin. red,  yellow and metallic gold Art Deco fluid acrylics with a hint of black in places on the edge. I wanted to add my pages to my art journal, so rather than work on an A4 sheet I trimmed it to size and created two almost identical pieces to glue in to my moleskin journal after the workshop.

I have a 'thing' about this TH pointy finger washi tape.... love it.... so it featured on both my red/yellow pages.

A little bit of stitching..... I always have to remind myself that less is more when I get near my sewing machine with paper  in hand!

And finally my butterfly, which I rubbed over with matt medium so that it would hold it's shape before coating with Glossy Accents to bring a bit of shine to my page.   Kate brought these butterflies with her for us to use. They're available as a digital download from her Etsy....

Here are a few pictures of the green page....

Bottle caps came into play for the circles plus some random splatters.

My colours for this page were cobalt teal, green hue and vermillion.

Rrandom stitching again, plus more stamping with Kate's texture cube stamp and a Stampers Anonymous flourish stamp both in acrylic paint and in black Archival Ink.  Obviously more doodles here and there but this time with TH's Distress Crayons

And here's the finish page with my ceramic tiles in place...

I was quite happy with these pages for my first attempt at Kate's techniques. Once I relaxed and went with the flow of just playing rather than trying to control the page, I began to enjoy both myself and the techniques.  It's was great fun and I'm certainly going to be doing it again.... and again....and again. 

What I really liked (and which surprised me) was that the pages began to take on an almost leathery texture as the layers built up. They would make stunning book covers. I can see a couple of journal or note book covers coming on in the near future...

Off now for more practise. Thanks for stopping by and have fun crafting this week.

Carol, xx