About Me

I'm a freelance artist, designer and demonstrator and have been involved in arts and craft my whole life in one way or another. I design stamps for top British company Personal Impressions, under the "Lindsay Mason Designs" brand, as well as papers, templates and other crafting products. I'm a certified Ranger Educator and my first book,"Stamping", was published in 2009. I also design regular projects for Crafts Beautiful magazine and have made guest appearances from time to time on QVC. I've recently joined You Tube under the name of LindsayMason1000 where I'm posting short technique videos and you can buy my paintings and hand crafted pieces from my Etsy shop. My work takes me all around the country demonstrating stamping, papercrafts and general inkiness! When I'm not working, I love gardening, church & community activities, nature watching, journalling, music and theatre and just relaxing at home. Email me at: ljm.design1@virginmedia.com

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Arachnaphobes....look away now!!!

Hello folks, here is the first of my two promised step by step tutorials. This one focusses on the little spiders that I like to add to cards, canvasses, tags etc. They work perfectly for Halloween of course, but also anything featuring, or for, little boys, teens or grown men!
Here's a close up of three that I added to the canvas featuring my "Humbert & Spider Boy" stamped images. The one on the right looks like it has two little white eyes but it's just the camera flash reflection! You could add little eyes if you wished though with a touch of permanent white pen. You can see the whole canvas in one of my earlier posts back in February.
So, to create these quick and easy critters you will need a fine black pen (I usually use a 0.1 Micron pen, but the fine end of a Marvy Le Plume would also work), black gems and whatever surface you are adding them to. I am just using white card here so that you can see things more clearly. Using the pen, draw a stuttery line coming down from where you want the spider to hang and stopping where you want him to actually be. Make sure that you don't draw a solid line as you are trying to get the effect of the fine spider silk, so the more hit and miss the better it will look. Next, draw four legs coming out from the line and to the left. Start them close together and try to make each of them go off in a slightly different direction to simulate those creepy spider legs! Repeat to the right of the line. Now stick a black gem to the bottom of the line so that it covers the inner ends of the legs. Tweezers can be very helpful for accurately placing the gems. Eh voila! A row of dimensional spiders created in just a few minutes! If you don't have any black gems you can use any others and just colour them with a black Promarker or alcohol ink. I prefer using the rounded gems but had run out and used faceted ones - but you can see that they look just fine. Remember that you can always add white dots for eyes if you want to go the extra mile on detail. Well, that's one step by step as promised at the weekend, so I will get on with the next one now. Hope you will find the spiders useful - they are great for adding that certain something extra to lots of projects. Let me know what you think and I'd love to see anything you make with them on!

4 comments:

Artyjen said...

Thanks for the tute! I'll definately try that idea out ;)
Hope you get some time to yourself in the garden over the Easter hols
xoxo Sioux

Diane said...

Brilliant, Lindsay! Definitely one to try so thank you muchly for that!
Diane x

Redanne said...

Thank you Lindsay for the great tutorial, mine always look a bit ham fisted but I like the dot dot type web that you do, it looks very realistic.

Joanne said...

Me no likey spiders - but I like those. roll on Halloween so I can have a go at making them.
Hugs again Joanne xxxx