Some New Watercolour Paintings

by VioletLeBeaux | Feb 25, 2013 | Art

I’ve been painting again. It seems the mood strikes once every six months or so!

These first two are just fairly standard but after having a terrible day, I splurged at an art store and bought some paper different than I generally use and it really inspired me to branch out into new techniques.

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In these techniques I’m trying to be a bit freer with my painting. Less concerned with mistakes. Less of a complete control freak XD

This has been my favorite piece so far, I realised half way through that it looked a bit like Flame Princess from Adventure Time.

I’m trying to play more with colour and texture which I really enjoy and be less concerned with the subjects.

I love colour.

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I’ve also been playing with different papers and cityscapes.

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It’s a very stressful time of year for us at the moment so it’s nice to have something that I really enjoy doing for late at night.

I’m having a lot of fun with these so hopefully the inspiration lasts! What has been inspiring you lately?

How To Do Temporary Hair Colour With Pastels

by VioletLeBeaux | Feb 22, 2013 | Hair, Hair-Tutorials, Tutorial

It’s been a really crazy week and between everything else I’ve been getting the next batch of these hair tutorials ready. Today’s tutorial is something that might help those of you thinking of dying your hair a crazy colour. I get quite a few comments and emails every saying “I want to do my hair like yours but I can’t because of school/work/something else”. Well this is a great way to see if it looks good before you commit or do it for the weekend and then wash it out before Monday!

The video version of this will be added as soon as I finish editing!

Let’s do it!

So you want to try out crazy colours but without the commitment? Using artist’s chalk pastels is perfect for this! I’ve done previous posts about using Illamasqua’s Pigments in the same way too if you happen to have some of those.

They’re cheap and easy to use and the colour sits very naturally in the hair without being crunchy or gross like some other temporary colours. Once it’s in and set you can just style as usual!

The hardest part is deciding what colour to choose! I picked a purplish pink a bit darker than my regular pink so you could see it a bit better in my hair. I think I want to try doing some purple and blue streaks in my pink too!

So you need a pastel and also a piece of cardboard so you can cover the other hair up.

Section the piece of hair you want to colour.

Put the cardboard under it to protect the other hair.

Then just draw the pastel over all of the hair.

Don’t forget the ends.

And the underneath as well.

Give it a quick blast with the hairspray to seal it all in.

Then just give it a brush through so it sits well with the rest of your hair and looks natural.

OMG IT WORKED! And when you’re done being pink/purple/blue/whatever you can just wash your hair and be back to normal!

And yes before you ask, you can do this on dark hair too. Pastels are generally opaque so as long as you pick a nice bright colour you should be good to go!

Go forth and enjoy being as crazy and creative as you want to with the knowledge you can wash it all out in the morning!

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Hope you enjoyed and let me know if you try it out!

Want to download this tutorial in one handy file?

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How To Decoupage Shelves – Home Sweet Home

by VioletLeBeaux | Feb 20, 2013 | Craft, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

When I did the Home Sweet Home reveals in early January I promised to show how I decoupaged all of the ugly black plastic shelves we had. It’s extremely easy to do though a little time consuming and all you need is some pretty paper, PVA glue and water.

This was the finished result of my shoe shelf:

It started out life looking like this:

I love these shelves, they really saved us storage-wise because they were only $10, fit in the wardrobe and are strong, easily stacked and moved so you can do pretty much anything.

Watch out for stray puppies trying to eat your supplies. These stray craft eating puppies are getting to be a serious problem 😉

Mix up some glue and water in a shallow bowl. I used around half water, half glue but your solution may depend on how thick your glue is. Basically you want it to be very watery but still white.

Tear up pieces of pretty paper. I used wrapping paper that matched the stuff on our bedroom doors but as long as it’s not super thin you can use pretty much anything. Tear up lots of different sizes and shapes now before you get glue everywhere, much harder to tear paper when you’ve got wet gluey fingers!

Dip a piece of paper into the glue so it soaks through.

Then wrap it around the shelf. Repeat over and over again with pieces of paper until you have covered the entire set of shelves. Make sure to overlap the pieces too, this will give it extra strength. Don’t try to match up patterns, just make everything random, the key to it looking good is selecting a paper which has a patter that can blend well that isn’t too busy.

Because the base of this is plastic you may have trouble getting the first couple of pieces to stick, I started on the columns and wrapped the paper around so it stuck to itself. This formed a base which I then worked out from.