Art Tags...a Little Something from Nothing

When I'm working with either watercolour or acrylic paint these days, I like to keep a couple of blank tags on my desk.  Instead of wasting the paint that's on my brush when I want to change colours, I doodle with the brush on one or both of the tags to use up as much of the paint as I can.  I end up with some interesting backgrounds and then later, I can add some doodles and lettering with a black pen to finish the tag.

This first tag was made using Twinkling H2Os or Twinks as they're often called.  I was working on some of the pieces I started on Saturday night.

I've also been playing around with writing with my glue gun (a lesson in the Letter Love 201 class).  I had a package of sparkly glue sticks in gold, silver, red, blue and green, so I thought I'd see what the gold and silver looked like using this technique.  I must say, I think I prefer the control I get from the dimensional Pearl Pens, and they seem to result in a very similar look, but the one neat thing the glue gun lets you do is create a dimensional word on your not stick mat and then pick it up and use it as an embellishment on another piece.  The Pearl Pens may work for this too, but I'll have to experiment to be sure.  The glue gun glue certainly dries quickly which is a real bonus!

While painting some of these with Silks acrylic glaze, I was again cleaning my paintbrush on a couple of blank tags.  You can see the painted tags on the right of this shot.

After doing some sewing, I went back and added some doodles to the tags using Pitt pens in black and silver, and a white Signo pen.  So far, I think I'm liking these tags more than the glue gun words, but I'll have to reserve judgement until I figure out how I'm going to use them in an art journal page.

And finally, here's a page I created using one of the glue gun words.  I did the word on a navy blue card stock and then lay it over the white journal page before spraying it with a copper Perfect Pearls mist.  I then moved the dark card stock out of the way and sprayed some bright yellow Dylusions ink onto the page.  I off set the card stock so that it would give me a bit of a bright highlight along the lower edge and to the right.  I added a quote in that space.  Finally I used a star shaped hole punch to cut the stars in the card stock and then I glued them randomly around on the yellow paper.  I found that the gold glue gun glue didn't show up as well as I hoped so I added a bit of a highlight using the white Signo pen. It actually stands out quite well but I couldn't seem to get a good shot that does it justice.