And Our Surprise Guest Designer For June Is. . . . . . . .

Hi everyone. Julia here again for the post I have been looking forward to the most this month. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce our Guest Designer for this month: the hugely, hugely, hugely (yes I meant to type that three times!) talented Alie Hoogenboezem-de Vries from Holland. I have long admired Alie's creativity and find her work inspirational. She is also a very sweet person too! What I love best about Alie's work is her versatility for so many genres. She is equally at home creating stamped masterpieces or altering old found objects that many people wouldn't know what to do with!

Did I mention that Alie is also a stamp designer too. . . . .?

Prepare yourselves for a treat as you scroll down. This is one fabulous tutorial and finished project from Alie. She has embraced my Flaming June challenge completely and in perfect style - just as I knew she would. 

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"At Our Creative Corner we have monthly Guest Designers who are chosen by the Challenge Host of that month. Julia is hosting the challenge in June 2014 and she has requested that I ask if you would like to be our Guest Designer for that month."

That was part of the mail I received from Laura...and wow it was sent to me, a Dutch stamping Grandma :-). Of course I feel honoured and I tried to create something that fits the challenge I got...This picture of the painting and the colour orange:

 

Flaming June by Frederick Leighton

I immediately had to think of Alcohol Inks... and used them on Stampinback cardstock.

 

  June - Summer - Hot - Flames...not a Frederick Leighton, not even nearby...but it was a start...

These poppies are stamps from Stampinback.nl...a real June flower, stamped with black Archival ink.

 

And still didn't know where to go to....

I started searching through my stuff and found this flat wooden birdhouse.  And sprayed the yellow, red and orange Dylusions Ink Sprays on it. That looks "hot" :-)

A Stampinback Circle stencil on the sprayed wood and using a wet babywhipe to get a less dull background.

 

A birdhouse needs birds. In the Netherlands, orange is a Royal colour so these crowned birds deserved to be orange too. I painted them with Amsterdam orange acrylic paint.

And then I had to combine all these mixed media together, to make an orange creation that had to fit the challenge: Flaming June...and part by part....

I glued a flower and a light bulb on top of the roof. Used different wooden parts for the word June. Stamped the black birds (Hero Arts stamp) on the wood with Archival and inked them a bit more with a permanent marker. Behind the hole there still is a little Royal birdie in the nest!!

But a few others already left the nest.

And finally here is my FLAMING JUNE...

 

 

Hard to catch the real colour, outside, so a few pictures of the final creation.

I had to cut off the lower part of the Alcohol inked card...the birdhouse wasn't long enough :-).

Four dewdrops in the punched corners.

And once again...but now for the last time...my interpretation of FLAMING JUNE.

 The background is ribbed cardboard from a box. I teared off some parts of the top layer and inked it with brown chalk and a bit of golden Acrylic paint. The yellow net is part of an onion net (no smell at all :-)). I used staples to adhere it to the cardboard. The wooden birdhouse I glued with Tacky Glue.

Thanks a lot Laura, Julia and OCC for this invitation!

It really was fun to create this Flaming June!

Kind regards

Alie Hoogenboezem-de Vries:-)

One word: WOW!  Didn't I say how talented this lady is? From beginning to end this tutorial will fill your head with ideas that you can translate to your own work in your own style. The colours are absolutely what I want to see from entrants for this challenge. Alie has used a great variety of mediums and shown how these can all tie together to produce a stunning end result. I love it all but what would I put as my top 3 elements of Alie's charming bird house hanging? The little birds with crowns, the little bird in the nest and that gorgeous 'hot' background with the stamped flowers. Thank you so much Alie for sharing this beautiful piece of art with us all. PS. I don't think of you as a Dutch stamping Grandmother!! : ) 

Love Those Leftovers Winner and Top 3

Greetings all!  Linda here to announce the winners of our Love Those Leftovers! challenge.  

I was happy to see that people really dove into the spirit of the challenge and riffled through their scraps bins.
A huge thanks to all who played along!  I hope you had as much fun doing that as I did.  I was even able to discard some of my scraps (with a thought process of "whatever was I thinking when I saved THAT?").  We all had a great time looking at your makes and being inspired by your creativity.  It's always a tough choice but in the end, I was able to whittle it down to a winner and three runners-up.

To get the ball rolling, we have a random drawn winner who will be the recipient of the Crafty Individuals prize. The lucky winner is......

No 24 

Jacky (Paddington Fan) 

Well done Jacky! Please email us and we will send you your Crafty Individuals prize! 

As part of the celebration here last month we announced that each comment made at the OCC would be an entry into the prize draw with a special mystery prize given to a lucky winner....

We had 262 comments written by midnight of the 31st May and the lucky person selected by Random.org was the 65th comment left for us. The person who wrote that comment was.....

 Helen - Stamping by H

Well done Helen! Please contact us and we will send you your package of crafty goodies! Hope you have lots of fun with them!!!

And now finally on to the other winners.  Our overall winner is Ruth from Love to Create with her Patchwork Heart Card.  It is so simple and so powerful in its simplicity.  What a wonderful example of how your leftovers can be used to make something beautiful!

My Top 3 (in no particular order) 

Ana K. from Anina paperckalnica

I love all the random vintage style bits and bots Ana has included in her mixed media piece.  Beautiful distressing and lovely vintage tones.  

Susi from froebelsternchen Susi

The wonderful background paper on Susi's tag is leftover DIY paper from a long time ago.  Beautiful use of texture paste on her tag - I especially love the sand dollar stamped with the texture paste!

Nikki from A2A - Addicted to Art

From the first page to the last, Nikki's mini album is absolutely exquisite.  It's page after page of pure yumminess!  Gorgeous distressing and textures combined with beautifully stamped images.  

Congratulations to all our winners and thanks again to everyone for playing along and for visiting us today.  I hope you will all be back to play in our Flaming June challenge that goes on through the end of the month!

September Sponsor Spotlight With Tando - Number 1

Hello everyone, Julia here with the first of our Sponsor Spotlight posts this month. We are delighted to be sponsored by Tando who produce wonderful chipboard products along with stencils and other must have items. Click on the image below to be taken to the Tando website.

For my spotlight I chose to use the Floral Grab Bag containing a variety of flower shapes in different sizes.

These chipboard products are wonderful to use with layers of paints, inks, mediums and your heat gun as they won't tear or buckle. Click on the image above to read more information about this product.

I decided to continue with the orange theme for my spotlight - (sorry to those who will require sunglasses to look at this post!). The light wood and yellow gives a little relief this time! I've made a hanging sign using a piece of driftwood I found on a local beach. It's a little 'sweet' for my taste but the person I have in mind to receive it will be very pleased!

The sign is hung with rusty wire and the driftwood has been left in an unfinished state to show the natural beauty of the grain.

Each flower is embossed in a folder and coated with gesso.

To achieve the graduated colour (ombre) on the flowers, various DecoArt paints were used - you can see the colour names in each image. Some colours may need more coats / or a thicker coat due to their transparency or pigment content.
 

The next colour is blended with a brush into the first colour.

The final colour is applied. Don't worry if the blending isn't perfect - this will be corrected in the following steps.

Each dry flower is then coated with a dark shade of brown paint.

Leave the paint for a short time then remove paint from raised areas using a baby wipe. Do this carefully as you will remove all the paint if you are too vigorous! Once dry, each flower is coated with either DecoArt Triple Thick Glaze or One Step Crackle.

This flower has Triple Thick Glaze applied. You can see how the rather clumsy blending now appears to be smoothly graduated - love how that happens!

This little flower has One Step Crackle applied followed by a little paint rubbed into the cracks here and there. A small black gem finished the flower.

Foliage is die cut from grungeboard (Tando produce some lovely leaves - why not check them out!).
After a good coat of gesso, the foliage is painted with the darker shade (as shown above left) followed by the lighter shade applied randomly with a piece of cut and dry foam. Finally, more lovely crackle! 

The letters were hand drawn and cut from grungeboard. The colour was applied as stated earlier (ombre technique). Brown paint was not applied. Instead, a damask image was stamped onto each letter using versamark followed by embossing with gold powder - I tend not to fully melt the powder because I prefer the finished result to be less than perfect! The edges were inked with archival coffee ink. Triple Glaze was then applied but I it was not the look I wanted. Help! I wanted a more antiqued look but was faced with a super smooth and shiny set of letters. I then applied some One Step Crackle and hoped it would work. I really love how it changed the look of the letters especially after adding a little burnt umber paint here and there.
A crackled fimo heart had to make an appearance didn't it?!

The small round 'buttons' make another appearance - these are made from fimo clay and finished with paint and crackle glaze.

The wire is attached to the wood with staples which are then hidden by the flowers.

A happy accident occurred on the letters. Once all the layers were dry, some of the gold EP had changed to a more silvery shade which I love. It gives that old, used look.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you are inspired by what can be done with a simple chipboard shape.

Have you entered our new challenge yet called 'Flaming June'? Click here to read all the details - it would be lovely if you joined in the fun too. Keep visiting us throughout the month as we have lots more inspiration for you with sponsor spotlights, guest designer post not to mention the winners from last month and a showcase post for one of our very talented followers.

Flaming June

Hello everyone, Julia here,  hosting the latest challenge at Our Creative Corner. 

Firstly, I'd like to let you know that our sponsor this month is the wonderful Tando company. They have kindly agreed to provide a prize for our winner this month. Don't know the company? Click on their badge below and have a look at the fabulous products on offer.

This month I'd like to give you a picture challenge. I hope the following painting by Lord Frederic Leighton will give you some wonderful inspiration. This stunning painting is a great favourite of mine with the beautiful depiction of fabrics, the human form and colour. The overtly romantic style may not be to your taste but be inspired by those gorgeous orange shades which are vibrant, warm and simply sumptuous.

'Flaming June' - Lord Frederic Leighton 1895

To qualify for our challenge this month, you MUST USE ORANGE as the main colour of your project. You may use any other colours needed to complete your work and further inspiration can be taken from the painting as you wish.

Please ensure you read our few rules before you enter the challenge here. We don't have many and they are there for everyone to follow! If you don't include LOTS OF ORANGE on your work, we won't be able to enter you for the randomly selected prize and that would be a great shame!

Without further ado, I would like to show you the inspiration created by myself and the amazing design team, just for you:

Julia

I've combined orange and rusty tones with some gold here and there  for my little gift bag. I love the warmth of orange and to me it is most certainly a 'happy' colour! I usually tend to combine orange with red if I use it so this was a new direction for me.

This is the little gift box found inside my bag. The contents will be revealed on my blog!

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Astrid

Creating a project for this theme was a serious challenge for me, these are colours I don't normally do.... But a challenge is a challenge after all, and so I had to come up with something. Well it turned out to be an ATB, and the colours became even brighter than originally intended. I guess I'm just longing for some serious warmth

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Laura

I don't use orange very much in my work so this was a good chance to bring out those hardly used inks and paints. I chose to focus on the brown tones as well as using orange as the main colour. With just hint of green, as featured in the plant in the painting, and we have a Flaming June tag!

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Claudia

I admit that I really struggled with this theme as I found that I love orange but hardly ever use it on my projects...don't ask me why - I hadn't noticed before. So it took me some time to figure out what I could or wanted to do...and finally one day - when I was playing around with my new Vintaj patina kit and had some orange coloured lace ribbon on my desk nearby - I came up with this leather and lace cuff bracelet. I incorporated the contrasting blue and green (of the sky and the plant in Lord Leighton's painting) that make the orange look even more intense. As there is a plant on the painting I decided to use a plant - the lovely branch embellishment - as the centre piece. There's even the orange fabric theme from the painting to be found with my creation. So - in a very special way - I stayed rather close to the original, didn't I? ;)

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Karin

I love the color orange and I use it often in combination with other contrasting colors.

On this card I used it in combination with blue and white paint.

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Susan

The Flaming June is a wonderful painting that exudes warmth and relaxed siesta, so it made ​​me relive my childhood with sun, summer and high heaven and I was inspired to this journaling page.

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Kerstin

The topic is rich orange tones as main colour - for me a feeling the need to create anything with  fire...

I originally had this long running idea of mixing Acrylic Painting and Steampunk, because that style is my new passion. For the background I used many nature stencils (sun rays, branches, spiderweb), crackle paint and distress paints for an old grungy look.

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Jenny

Like many of the team shades of orange can be my nemesis so I was stumped for a while, but for me there was something distinctly neo-classical about Leighton's painting so I went with a marble-effect background as a starting point, courtesy of Wendy Vecchi's archival reinker technique.

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Alison

I'm another one for whom Orange is a real challenge, and there's an extravagant Romanticism to the painting too, which is not my usual kettle of fish... but there's a reason it's called a "challenge".  There's a "careless desolation" in how she's thrown herself down to sleep, so I think I ended up trying to offer her some reassurance in my tag - that there is still love and beauty and no need to curl up away from it all.  And I guess I also picked up on that vase of flowers, though it became a bit more prominent in my version!  Come and see more over at Words and Pictures.

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Linda




Unlike most of my team members, orange was not a struggle for me.  I love the luscious vibrancy of the color and thoroughly enjoyed putzing around my studio to create this tag.   It was one of those times when it really developed itself once I got the base layer created. 

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Wasn't that just a feast for the eyes? I hope you get some ideas from the examples made by my teamies who are all wonderfully talented women.

It's your turn now to link up a project which must use ORANGE as your main colour. Please do visit the design team and leave some love - we really appreciate comments too!

Don't forget to pop back for the 'Sponsor 'Spotlight' articles this month. All of these showcase some of the products from our wonderful sponsor this month:

We also have an amazing Guest Designer this month who will be here on the 11th June - I'm so excited about this wonderfully talented lady agreeing to showcase her work during my challenge month! Last but not least, come back on the 22nd June to see our Top Talent Spotlight - another very talented person to wow you with their work.

Thank you for visiting us today and we're all looking forward so much  to seeing what you make. 

Juliax