Beautiful Fall Apple Crafts/ Let's Go Apple Picking/ Budget Friendly Autumn DIY Decor & Paint Tips

Hello my crafty tribe, this is Artsy Maddie and let's go apple picking. That is the theme of today's crafts. So I'm just going to start off with this gather wooden sign that I was able to find at Dollar Tree. They actually have a few of them, family I believe is one and thankful is the other. So if you find these these are a great find. So I'm just going to give it a coat of leaf green just all over just so that the sides and the back if any of that shows that it'll have some color to it. And then I'm just going to decoupage some of this scrapbook paper that I have. It's actually from an apple pack of paper and I just thought it was really pretty and it just kind of goes with the color scheme that I'm doing. So just trying to line it up as best I can. And I use lots of Mod Podge Speed just because it is a really heavy cardstock. Like it's actually one of the heaviest scrapbook papers I've ever seen but it took a little bit more time to sand it than usual but it came out great. I was really happy with it so it was worth the effort. You just want to let it dry really really well before you start sanding. So just sand in a downwards motion on all the edges and it'll clean it nice and give it that super smooth finished edge that everyone loves so much. So then I wanted to create a leaf for I'm doing like a large basket apple. So I wanted to create a large paper leaf and I'm just doing that with some masking tape over a piece of and then just decoupaging it with the Mod Podge down to some just regular printer paper. Just your regular old white paper. I do wish that I kind of had cut the masking tape in a little bit of a leaf shape too just because you can see it a tiny bit through the paper so just keep that in mind. So this basket I recently found at a thrift store for $1.50 and I just I noticed that it had this wire rim around the top and I thought I bet I can shape this like an apple so it worked out great. I'm super happy with it. It was just this square basket and then just by squeezing the metal frame to have that little divot at the top and then round it at the bottom just kind of gives it that apple shape. And then I'd also found this quite a while ago this greenery too. It says Ashland's which I believe is Michael's brand but I got it for a really good deal I think it was only a dollar or two as well so I just thought they all went well together. So just drawing the leaf shape onto that paper so if you see you can see the masking tape through it a little bit so I think if I had to shape that more just to complement the shape of the leaf then it would be less noticeable but it's still fine I'm still really happy with it. So I'm just gonna use three different greens so a deep green a medium green and a light green and just paint in the directions that your leaf veins would go. So just kind of from that main vein out to the edges and just blending some of the colors together just for a natural kind of variegated look of the leaf and just kind of blending them all together. So don't be frightened it's just paint anyone can do this. And then for the stem I'm so excited I've I've in the springtime a lady on Kijiji was offering a crib that had a whole bunch of spindles for free and she may even be subscribed to my channel so if you are thank you so much I am finally going to be using all these little spindle pieces. So my husband helped me pry this crib apart and now I have all these wonderful spin spindles with lots of neat textures and and little parts to them so you'll be seeing those in lots of crafts coming up so I'm going to use that as the the little stem of my apple on the top. So I just got the greenery glued down I decided to go with kind of a diagonal look on top of here you guys will have to let me know if you would have done that or just straight across I was having trouble deciding but this is what I opted for so just using some Aleene's tacky glue and then a little bit of hot glue just for the quick hold and just got that mounted down so then for this too I'm just going to use a little bit of the tacky glue and then some hot glue around the edges and I'll just be careful with it but it actually held really well it kind of goes right into the grooves of the basket so it gets a pretty good hold and then there's a little tiny piece of wire on the edge of this leaf that I just glue that down into the basket as well and I thought I would just dry brush a little bit of the light green around the edges just to give it a little bit more variation so for this I just used a bit of hot glue and attached it a little bit to the stem as well so I think it'll actually help hold and support the stem too with the little wire going down into the basket and that is it you guys will have to let me know what you think of this one I just thought this was such a fun theme this is actually the think outside the box challenge that the Crafty Quinn Megan hosts every third Wednesday of the month and this this month's theme is let's go apple picking so I'm going to have their links to their channels in my description box her co-host this month is Rebecca Virginia DIY so these girls are both super creative really fun to watch really great ladies so be sure to check out their channels they'll also be a playlist and I will have the link to that as well so then I have this cute little squirrel I found him at Dollarama which is our local dollar store here in Canada and he's super cute he has an awesome sculpt to him they just don't have the time to paint them very well so you just kind of get what you get with their paint jobs but I saw the potential I really love the sculpts that they get so I'm just going to go through take the time to give them a bit more detail so just making sure that the whole little crab apple that he's holding is all painted and then just pull up a picture for reference like whatever animal you're painting you can just pull up some pictures on google images for reference and I noticed that most of the squirrels had a light colored tummy like either white or cream color so that's what I did I just gave him a light color tummy and some highlights on the edges of his tail so I just want to give him lots of variation lots of you know the different colors no animals fur is ever just one color it's always a mixture so just going in and adding some shadows into the ears just to give him some depth and then to make sure the eye is completely covered with black so even if you weren't up for painting the whole animal I feel like even if you just touched up the eyes and maybe touched up a little bit of the paint that can even just make a huge difference but especially the eyes so just taking my time getting the eye completely dark and then just going in and doing some shadowing so this was like a little bit of a wash so it's a I'm using a very wet paintbrush with some burnt umber and then just going down into the back where there would be a lot of shadowy kind of darker colors and just get it all blended in so this is just kind of a quick easy way to fix them up without having to like completely repaint like not having to start again with a white base coat or anything just kind of using what's already there and making the most of him so I noticed that most of the squirrels in the pictures also had light edging around their eyes so I thought I would just try and create that on him as well so just kind of fanning out the edges with a little baby wipe so just kind of going in close to the eye and then just fanning out the edge with the baby wipe it's not too hard to do you just want to anchor your elbow on the table and then just move your piece more so than your arm just so you have kind of a solid hold with your arm and that you're comfortable like in a comfortable position to paint and then I noticed they also had a little bit of light right beside their nose so just kind of blending in a little bit of light with the baby wipe and then a deeper shadow right on the bottom of the tail so I went right in with a black wash just to get that nice deep definition of the tail so you make it a wash just by adding some water to your paintbrush and that'll give you that transparent kind of wash and then just going in dry brushing some burnt umber just to get some darks in there so dry brushing just means that you have very little paint on your brush so I'm using the napkin to wipe it off so that there's not very much paint on the brush at all and it kind of creates the texture of fur too with these brushes these are actually the children's brushes from Dollar Tree and I really like them there'll be a few bristles come out right at first when you very first start using it but then once those few bristles have come out they're really great brushes they actually hold up really well and you can be pretty rough with them and they they're good they're nice and durable so I'm just going in and creating the lights and the darks and just getting lots and lots of texture into this fur so we're going to go over it entirely with the glaze in a moment here but just building up the lights the light shading into the fur and then the dark shading into the fur so the gray was just black and white mixed together just making my own gray so now here we'll do a glaze over top of the whole thing so glaze just makes it transparent and gives you a little bit of working time so it'll stay wet so you're able to wipe it off and then just have it stay in the grooves that are actually part of the sculpt so I do about five parts glaze to one part paint and I'm just adding some of that burnt umber so I'm just going to go over this whole thing so putting the glaze over top of the whole thing and then we can wipe it off and it'll sit into those little grooves that are in the sculpture and just give the fur more texture so I'm actually using a shop rag those blue paper towels that don't have any lint on them so those are kind of handy to have and then I save them just for this type of purpose I've even noticed I think they sell them at the dollar store now they're just shop rags they're almost always blue I believe or just at any auto value or auto parts store they have them as well or just a cotton rag just make sure it's lint free so you don't put a bunch of fuzzies all over all over your project so then once that I dried I'm just going to go in with a little bit of white just dry brushing just on the very edges just where I want you know just little highlights where he would have little bits of light on his fur so it just takes time to build up the textures and colors like I said if you don't have the patience for this though just do the eyes the eyes make such a difference so I'm just going in and adding the little highlights that you would see um when a light shines on something glossy and dark just those white highlights and then I went over it with the glossy mod podge so just over the eye with the glossy mod podge I'd actually sealed him too with just the mod podge spray some matte sealer and then after that was done I just went in with some gloss over the eyes and that is it there's the cute little squirrel you guys will have to let me know I'll have to think of a name for him I don't have one yet but let me know if you have one do you guys have crab apples where you live that's really the only apples we have here there's not many orchards or anything I live in the prairies in Alberta so hopefully one day I'll really get to apple pick up I've only ever picked crab apples here and they're just little tiny sour apples so for the next project I just printed out some apple shape printables and I printed out two of them in a five by seven format when you go to print and you pick what size I just did two as five by seven and four as the three by five I believe it is the wallet size actually not three by five two by three I think it is that's the wallet size so it fit perfectly on this book so I'm gonna do a small one for my tiered tray that's coming up and then a larger one just to have with this display and this is just an old book that nobody's reading anymore so I just thought I would use it for this project and as much as I love books I also love book crafts so hopefully you guys won't be mad at me I I'm a real book lover as well and it is a little bit difficult for me to cut up a book but it just looks so pretty there's nothing quite like printed pages for that pretty um backdrop I guess for lack of a better word that the words give so I just went through and I cut out about 20 pages at a time I just had some nice really strong scissors and then I had made this little cut out here with the cardboard that made it really easy to draw out the pattern so every 20 pages I would just kind of draw out the pattern cut it out and it worked really quick really easy and then they're almost exact I'm a pretty accurate cutter so not too bad I've seen other people do it with just a exacto knife but you need a pretty fine one kind of a detailed exacto knife so just finishing this up here and then I'm going to use these little stamps here so I just found a collection of little kind of fall stamps that I liked and I thought that I would go through some of the pages just random pages and add some green and some burgundy into these pages so I just had this kind of lime bright green kind of a leafy green color stamp pad and then I also have a burgundy one and just went through and added some random prints onto the pages and then once I had that done I used the stamp pad as well just to go over the edges of the cut out and this added so much detail I just love it and I think it worked so much better than paint because it would stick the pages would stick together so much more with paint so this ink just worked perfectly for this so I would highly suggest the ink for doing the edges so just going through I couldn't decide on on a like granny smith green apple or a red apple and then I just thought well I'll just do a little combination of both because I'm really enjoying those colors for this little display here this little vignette so I just kind of blended them together and just take your time and try and get each page and then I'm going to be using some leaves on this as well so just that same wire and I'm going to create some little tiny leaves for this so I'm using similar technique just with the masking tape folding it over and sandwiching it over the wire and then just cut that little leaf shape and then just easy peasy you've got a little leaf and it's already on the wire stem to go down into the middle of the apple so then for the actual stem of the apple I thought I would use these golf tees so I'm just giving them a coat of black to make sure that none of that blueprint that's on them shows through when I'm done painting them so I thought I would start with the black and then I'll go over it with the browns after so just letting that dry and then just same thing painting the leaf I have some light green medium green painting in the direction that the veins would go on the leaf so from that main stem outwards and you'll get kind of a natural look and then I just put them in the roll of tape to dry so they would stand up and I could do both sides that way so just using a tan color on the golf tees and then I just dry brushed a little bit of dark brown just to give them some added texture and dimension and then once that was all dry for the bigger apple I thought that the tea was only going to go in so far like it would only go in about halfway so for the bottom half of the apple I just wanted to give it something to wrap around like that the spine of the book would coil around so I just rolled up a little bit of paper onto the bottom of the wire and then it worked out pretty good so I just slid that down to the bottom of the wire with the leaf and then the golf tee will just sit on top of it so just gluing that all together so I actually just used hot glue for this just put some hot glue in the spine of the book put the little coil at the bottom and then just glued the back pages of the books together so you might have to glue a couple of them like if you do these two pages that are right at the back of the book you might have to glue a couple beside it as well too just to get a really good hold and then once you're happy with it so just kind of test it out to make sure that the back part isn't going to be pulling away on each other and that the spine doesn't let go so if you just glue a few of those pages at the back it'll help reinforce that and here they are what do you guys think I'm super happy with them I just I love the look of the printed word and then you'll probably see this little one on my tear tray coming up in a few days as well so keep an eye out for that I won't show the tutorial again but just I just love my tear tray and then I found these apples at the thrift store as well I can't get over how real they look like they make me do a double take all the time because I keep thinking why is there a bag of apples over there because I've had them kicking around for a while I think I found them last year sometime and they really strike me so real I don't know how they got the paint to look like this but they're very realistic and then I also found this cute little basket a while ago it reminds me of the style of potato baskets that my mom used to love so much and then this old scarf of hers too so this project kind of reminded me of her and brought me a lot of happiness so here's everything together let me know what you guys think be sure to check out the playlist there's going to be lots of great inspiration lots of my friends just love this challenge it's so much fun we can't wait for it every month so be sure to check that out and the links to the hosts as well will be listed in my description box if you haven't subscribed already I hope you'll consider it and hopefully I've inspired you today we'll talk to you in the next video thank you guys