RETRO Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2014– August

                                                                                            
Disclaimer:  I didn't make it in time for Tim Holtz in August because I was busy with another exciting project that I will tell you about on the 11th of this month!

I did promise myself this that I would commit to make a tag for every month of 2014 – so I decided to go ahead and make one retroactively.

If I am submitting to the Holtz Collection, I try to stay within the Tim Holtz / Ranger line of products,stamps, trinkets and dies.  That challenges me to be original in the interpretation and arrangement of something familiar and well-known to his global fan-base.  I gotta tell ya though, while it’s lovely to rework the theme with my existing stash of Holtz’ings, the pressure gets cranked up. I always kinda think – it’s like taking a famous symphony and then putting your own touch on it, this is an extremely high-risk enterprise!!!  The devotees hold you to high standard so to deliver a half-holtzed attempt is something akin to sacrilege right? 

So since I didn't make the TH Blog deadline, I decided that I was just going to go a little nuts and use the layout and the technique somewhat but I would branch out of the Holtz collection and give myself the creative freedom to go where my eye and heart was leading.  On the right is the result boldly titled “Dreamer of dreams”.

Recently, I have been wondering about consciousness, forms of  knowing, seeing with different forms of vision.  I have become very taken with the quest to see how much more of the experience of consciousness we can experience.

I am so grateful to a few people in my life but particularly to my first husband  - “Bear, the Fire-starter” as well as my “Chairman Mau” who have both steered me in directions that got me to this point where I feel like I am slowly being delivered into a realm of consciousness that I didn’t know I could exist within.  

I am grateful that I finally have awakening to the idea that to be conscious is to love, to feel connected, and to embrace the dreams that exist inside my inner world that I have always been ashamed to acknowledge existing inside there.

I am thankful that I have the opportunity to express my inner vision through this medium of collage or mixed media art.  I have always loved the Holtz style because it resonates with how my mind projects my thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories on its internal canvas. There is something intimately familiar in his style that reminds me of how my mind sees, interprets and organises the world.  My dreams are vivid, in colour and a little all jumbled together in a wondrous, whimsical medley of sights and sounds superimposing themselves on existing memories and feelings.  I love that I can express the incredibleness of it somewhat through the medium of art.

Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2014 – June Edition

Would you believe it – I even managed to get my June tag ready before halfway through the month? 
Ever since I bought a series of Tim Holtz stencils, I have become very attached to them.  I was particularly excited to get started on this tag because it was  about cool stencil effects.  And since I now own a stack of these (Yes they finally arrived in my little dorpie in South Africa), I take every chance I get to bust them out and make up for the long lost time that I had to do without them. The technique this month was deliciously simple but a fabulous watercoloury stencil effect. 

In my last post – I showed you a background I did for the “Follow Your Heart” tag.  What I did was lightly mist the cardstock with water and only ink up the stencil, then I pressed the stencil down onto the wet cardstock.  I like this batik look and I do like the way the die pools up in certain places.

The technique Tim demonstrates for the stencil background of his June tag is very similar – except that he inks and mists the stencil and doesnt print on damp cardstock.  His method is so much more vibrant and gives a really lovely blended coverage.  See his tag here:
  
One of the personal goals I set for  myself every month for this particular tag-share is to reinterpret the elements and theme such that it does preserve the technique and theme of the tag while challenging me to be more creative with my style.  I think its fun or like a really cool game to create something within certain boundaries but with the freedom to superimpose my brand of creative urging.
I am going to share a mini step-by-step of how I made this tag which I turned into a card topper.  I am going to try and show exactly what elements I kept and re-interpreted.

Well there it is then – I kinda had fun doing the pic-torials with the arrows and the text as well.  Until later!

Tim Holtz 12 tags of 2014 May

With 1st Semester exams underway for my students, my time has finally freed up a little for me to devote some much craved for time to make my “tag” entry for the May 2014 edition of the Tim Holtz challenge. Over there on the left was what the talented Tim challenged us with.The focus was on using all those ideology trinkets that we all love to collect and framing them on little paper tiles.  He also showcased the new shadow embossing folders there on the bottom right.  Those haven’t arrived in my part of the global woods yet so I had to change it up a little.


For this month’s “tag” – I decided that I wanted to make something more functional than a tag. Father’s day is coming up and that requires an awesome card for Dad.  I put tons of work into this piece inspired by the TH May because I have a brilliant dad who deserves every bit of detail and attention and coolness.


I also got inspired for the design of this tag by how much I loved the effect of the pipes in my previous post (Click the grey text to go there -the rosey pipe-line for Linda Ledbetter's CC3 Challenge).  I decided to mess around some more with pipe configurations and I really love how this card turned out.  I think my dad is going to like it too.


For the background of the card I used the diamond plate from the diamond plate and riveted metal texture fade set by sizzix and the Brick wall stencil from Enmarc. 

Making the glazed brick texture was one of those salted UTEE experiments.  I inked through the Brick Wall stencil with Archival Ink first in Monarch Orange and then lightly in Plum and then with my salted UTEE heat embossed. 

The effect it created was a lovely, rough and sandy looking glazing.  I have to remember this trick for later. Over that I layered the riveted metal piece that I painted with distress paint.  I wanted to create the effect of an industrial basement in a building with some exposed face-brick wall and valves and gauges and pipes.






To make the pipes – I did the old drinking straw trick again – you can find out how I did that in the post that precedes this by clicking here: http://tincanhandmade.blogspot.com/2014/05/everything-is-coming-up-roses.html












I used a variety of Ideology tinkets and the Gears Die to embellish the tiles.  The tiles are cut from a variety of Tim Holtz papers and I stamped on some of them with some industrial blueprint looking stamps from the Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous Collection.



So I think I kept the theme of the May challenge – don’t you?  I’m entering it as my version.  It is all about what those tag challenges inspire right?  Hope Mr Tim doesn’t mind that I didn’t make a tag.  More importantly – I love that this is going to be dad’s father’s day card – getting all those straws etc. to glue and stay glued at the proper angles was a proper mission, I fiddles with the details for hours.  Dad is the only guy who can be trusted to treasure and appreciate all the work and of course all those lovely ideology trinkets!