Charcoal Experimenting

Last night I began playing with some charcoal pencils I have. Now I'll be clear I've played with charcoal pencils many times. I have however, never used them for sketching. Last night I sat by myself, watching some tv and just sketching whatever came to me. Here are some of the pieces I ended up with. I was ubber excited about them! I in no way think I'm a sketch artist now but they defiantly made me want to play a bit more with these on my layouts and cards. Experiment more. I sketched and shaded and then sprayed with a workable fixative to ensure they would not smudge anymore after I was done. I also used the fixative because now I can still water color them if I choose to.

Like I said their not going to be framed in my house but I really had a lot of fun just playing to play, working with shading and so forth. I'm definitely going to be playing more with these in the future.

Inspired

Over this past weekend I mentioned joining my dear friend Tracy, the owner of my fave adhesive company, Helmar Adhesives USA. She did a canvas piece that was just great. Tonight I needed to put together a card for a gal at work for her 13 year anniversary at work.

I immediately thought of the play time Tracy had. I wanted to share this piece of information because sometimes we watch a video or see a project and think "oh that's great, but I don't do canvas pieces." Or card or layouts or whatever it may be. My advice is to not be limited by just what you see. So, what if its canvas, that doesn't mean you can't pick up a little something from it to draw inspiration at a later date to use on something completely different and maybe in a different way even. Here is what Tracy made the other day.

I watched and enjoy and then tonight remembered the torn book pages and what a great textured fun background they made.

I then decided to use that inspiration towards my card tonight. This is what I came up with.

I adore how well this turned out. I think the gal at work is really going to like them. I'm definitely going to be going more background like this. I carried over the front onto the inside, which I thought turned out well. Just goes to show you never know where you can draw your inspiration from.

To see the entire project by Tracy and countless other wonderful things check out her blog HERE