I'm A Tagmaniac!

I'm part of a group called Artistic Portfolios....mainly the women I do collaborative art journals with, and most of whom I get to see in Key Largo at our (now) yearly Keys4Art retreat.  We've been creating backgrounds and journal pages and sending them to everyone in the group.  Our next project is tags, and we're making two for each participant.  Of course we can do whatever we like with them, but the idea is to incorporate them somehow into the journals that we're going to make with all the pages we'll be getting.

I used this as a way to play around with some of the techniques I've been doing lately, some from weekly challenges and some from workshops. 

These use the brushless watercolor technique that has popped up on TWO recent challenges (see prior posts for the details), and I've used Wendy Vecchi stamps (except for the sentiment, which is Stampin' Up):



This next set of tags has the nice and easy color blocking technique by Sir Tim (see last week's Grungy Monday for the deets):

The background stamp is Tim's and of course, umbrella man, who looks great on the colorful base, is a Tim die.

One of my all time favorite techniques (and I don't know who to credit it with because I've seen it in so many different places) is a variation of Joseph's Coat.  You stamp over patterned paper with clear ink, emboss it with clear powder, and then cover the whole thing with dark (usually black) ink.  The embossed areas retain the original pattern, and if you've used colorful paper it really pops.  I did several tags with that method:

I did the technique on 12x12 papers and used very dark blue ink instead of black, then cut the papers up into tag size, which is why each background is slightly different.  They're also all embellished differently.  I've used Spellbinders butterfly and dragonfly dies, Tim's mini butterfly and cage/bird dies, and one more.....

To get that rich deep and very distressed looking blue finish on the butterflies on the ribbon, I stamped the row of butterflies from Tim's Papillon set on black paper with clear ink, and then used blue UTEE (Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel).  Then I just cut them out and fastened them to the tag with the tiny attacher.

The next few tags gave me the opportunity to play around with the use of stencils over collage. 

Small squares from a previously done collage were glued down on the tag on the left.  The entire tag was covered with adhesive.  After the squares went down, gold UTEE was applied....embossing powder/enamel sticks to glue just as well as to wet ink....which created the mosaic effect.  Final touch:  stenciling in black paint and then some black crystal bling.

On the right, the collage was not cut up, but the same stencils and bling were used.

All of the following started out as collaged pieces, mainly text and patterned tissue paper.  Some had a little embossing added, others received images, and all were stenciled.