Mixed Media On the Go with Nathalie Kalbach by Stampendous

All this week the Stampendous team are having a play date with our good friend and amazing designer, Nathalie Kalbach. Each year she designs some versatile and awesome stamp, templates, and stencil sets for Stampendous. Personally, I've been soooo looking forward to this week to show off what I love about her designs. But first of all, I know you'll want the prize opportunity info...

We are mixing it up for three commenters during the hop. Each prize package includes all three of Nathalie Kalbach’s Foam, Cling Rubber and Stencil Stamp sets. But WAIT! This is open to everyone! Comment on each blog post at Stampendous and that of each designer’s post on the hop this week. We’ll announce winners on Monday May 2nd. Now, here is what I've played with...

At the CHA (Craft and Hobby Association) show in Anaheim both this year and last year, I really enjoyed watching Nathalie demonstrate in the Stampendous booth with her designs. She always works with a mixed media journal at these events as it is a perfect way to take your art on-the-go! She's so relaxed with it...happy and laughing and going where the colors take her (occasionally off of the pages and all over everything else, including her, lol), you can really sense her joy in her artwork...or artPLAY! My post today was inspired by her...

Recently, I finally purchased a mixed media journal, not a big one, but manageable for me. I've had it sitting next to my workspace, so that every time I have extra ink or paint on my craft mat or my Stampendous Creative Palette, I can transfer it onto pages of this book for future inspiration. Most of the color on these two pages came from leftover Radiant Neon Reinkers from Tsukineko. I looooove these colors. They can be super vibrant or can be toned down a bit by thinning with water or acrylic paint. When doing either, it helps the ink to dry more quickly as well. Somewhere along the line I'd had extra Dreamweaver Crackle Embossing Paste which I pasted through the Dreamweaver Tiles stencil so that I had these small patches of boxy shapes for texture. This week I had some extra lime paint from another project (you'll see it tomorrow), so on the left page I placed a few of the "leaf" templates that I removed from the stencil insert that comes in Nathalie's Bird Foam Stamp and Cling Rubber Stamp and Stencil set. I painted some of the green paint over the top, and when removed, they left the leaf shapes filled with the previous colored background. The Bird Foam Stamp was inked with Onyx VersaFine and stamped over the top, and the leaf stencil was used to ink and add a couple of leaves for a perch. Both were embossed with Stampendous Aged Black Embossing Enamel.

The page on the right follows similarly...only I used the stencil for sponging the paint through the leaf images, and the image was the Cling Rubber Bird, inked and embossed as before.

I wanted to add some sort of saying (it is a journal after all!), but didn't trust myself to hand write it and not mess up my pages, so I used this wonderful sentiment from Stampendous, stamped in black on white copy paper. I drew a loose frame around it, and used the DecoArt Decou-Page to adhere it to the page, and then brushed it over both pages. While wet, I sprinkled Color Fragments over the surface for more texture and color.

I was really happy with how both pages turned out, and look forward to creating more of them. I have a whole book to fill with happy art!

For more inspiration from Nathalie and our team, here are the links to follow today...

Stampendous Blog

Louise Healy

Janelle Stollfus

Tenia Nelson

Pam Hornschu

Nathalie Kalbach Blog