Mixed Media Artist

Materials and Tools: images scissors packing tape or contact paper water canvas foam brushes acrylics matte medium liquid or self-leveling medium (optional) cardstock 1. Paint a small canvas with the acrylic color of your choice. Cut or tear out pictures from a glossy magazine or catalog. Apply packing tape and burnish well. (more details on making packing tape transfers can be found at this tutorial. 2. Cut the transfers to the sizes you need and arrange them on your canvas. Soak in water and remove the paper backing. 3. Moisten the canvas with a thin layer of matte medium and apply the transfers. Top them with another thin layer of matte medium to cut the shine. The shine you see in this photo is from my flash…the surface has a satin look, not glossy. 4. Without waiting for the top layer of medium to dry, paint around and in between your images to soften the lines. Add any colors that you want. 5. Make a tape transfer of a phrase that you want to add to your collage. The nice thing a

This is one of the most simple collages that I’ve done in a long time. The biggest departure for me was to mirror image what I might normally do: most often I would have the bird on the left side, looking towards the writing on the right. I am still not sure if I like the final results here, but it was an interesting exercise to flip things around. And I didn’t even sew anything onto the collage!! Shock! It is so hard for me to keep it this pared down. Anyway, here’s how I made it: 1. Print out an image that you wish to transfer onto an inkjet transparency. The instructions for doing one of these transfers are in this image transfer post . Transfer the picture to smooth colored cardstock instead of fabric. Cut it out and top it with gloss medium. 2. Take two similarly sized squares of patterned or colored cardstock. Keep the background square whole, and rip a strip out of the other. Cut a piece of dark cardstock (I used black) slightly bigger than the patterned square. 3. Adhere the st

While I can’t tell you the exact settings that you will need to use to alter your photo into a slightly blurred "fuzzy memory", I’ll take you through the steps that I used on Joshua’s portrait. It’s a bit hard to tell online, but Joshua’s features are in focus while the rest of the image is softly blurred. And the color has obviously been changed. So, grab an image that evokes sleepytime or daydreaming for you, and let’s go! 1. Open your file in Photoshop, duplicate the image, crop and size it. 2. Add a curves adjustment layer. Lower the contrast, dim the highlights, and dull the whites. 3. Add a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Tick off colorize, and add sepia tones (hue approximately 38, saturation approximately 25). Shift the lightness slider left until satisfied. Adjust opacity. 4. Merge all layers onto a new layer. 5. Add as much gaussian blur as you like and adjust opacity. 6. Apply a layer mask, and bring the child’s features back with a large soft brush. Copyright 200