My favorite part of Christmas

Is the day after Christmas. The kids are home playing with their new toys. The work of the holidays is done; time to put my feet up and enjoy the family.

This is a box I made using the spellbinders die Abstract Mosaic to cut all the paper tiles. I then glued them on with Aleene’s Tack-It glue, filling in the open spots with gold leaf. The hole box was covered in 2 coats of Liquid Laminate.

Spellbinder’s is having their design team search. This last year on the design team has been great fun.

the pawns

The pawns on the black side all started with a plastic frog. They were then placed on a base, this pawns is on some plastic peas from my daughter’s grocery store. The top is a little plastic squid glue upside down. My kids were all very much into making this chess set out of their toys; they didn’t want any of these toys anymore. They all helped with the painting and assemblage of the pieces.

Re-use Mc Donald’s Toys

As seen in Altered Arts Magazine:

I guess I have to admit it, I take my kids to Mc Donald’s, I am addicted to their iced coffees. I get to enjoy reading a magazine or actually having a conversation with my husband, while the kids play; a perfect way to spend a Saturday morning. With each of the kid’s meals they get a toy, once in a while it is something they like but most of the time it is quickly discarded. Well, you know me, I can’t throw anything away so I cut the toys up and glue them back together and created a chess set for my oldest son.

Custom made chess sets available for sale

Check back because I’ll show more photos and describe how I made it.

Creating your own background paper using color washes.

Happy Winter Holidays
Winter in the Sonoran desert means I get to enjoy the outdoors as the sun is shinning and it is about 60 degrees. A great time to go outside and get messy creating some custom background paper. This is a great way to use up scrap paper. The star on this card was made from left over photo paper that I had after printing a few photos. I sprayed it with color washes and sprinkled it with Pearl ex. The background was a scrap of white cardstock.

The dies used are Spellbinders Stars, Long scalloped Rectangles, and Long Rectangles. the stamp is from Rubber Necker Stamp Company.

Reuse

Reuse and reduce your ecological footprint. I think that is important but I also like the way those things we have laying around look when included into art work. Using packaging material is a great way to add texture and interest to artwork. The butterfly was cut from corrugated cardboard using the wizard embossing system. The background is made from a piece of screen and burlap. The text was printed on an old math book page, and some old washer made a great embellishment.

Cover of Altered Arts Magazine

My Snowflake book appears on this month’s cover of Altered Arts Magazine.
There are stepped out photos of the techniques I used in the article. My opalized fantasy film technique is used in the book. I’ll post the directions to that one soon.

Welcome

Welcome to Jeni’s Mixed Media Madness. I’m a mixed media artist My artwork is about texture and color; I produce work to draw the viewer into the piece, calling out to be touched and encouraging the viewer to interact with it in some way. I enjoy working with paints, inks, metal, trash (recycled treasures), stamps, photos, clay, fiber – ok, I guess I’ve never met an artistic medium I didn’t like.