One of the earliest memories from school is ‘Smartie Time’ and it always brings a smile to my face. This was when I was in Infants School so I must have been 5 or 6 years old. Smartie Time took place every Friday and each pupil in the class received a little cup of Smarties (here in the UK they are sugar-coated chocolate confectionery – similar to M&M’s) and the teacher would take us through the letters that we had learned during the week. Smarties are synonymous with letters of the alphabet due to the packaging having letters on it, so I suppose they linked in well to our learning at school. You could be called a Smartie if you remembered them all too. I’m very pleased to be able to join this month’s theme of “Back to School” being hosted by Bleubeard and Elizabeth over at Art Journal Journey – thanks for the inspiration!
I covered the background with a thin layer of white acrylic using a baby wipe and then stamped blocks of the alphabet using Memento ink. To do this I formed the wood mounted letter stamps into a block pattern and held them in place with elastic bands before inking and stamping them. Smarties always came in a box at school rather than the usual tubes so I created a box shape out of Smarties packaging and some blue paper. I fussy cut the word Smartie and added letter stickers to another piece of blue paper for the word “Time”, then I used double-sided foam tape to stick them all onto the box. I stuck on additional sweet images using a UHU Stic and edged the box with a Navy Spectrum Aqua Marker and secured it to the page using double-sided foam tape. Next I stamped the slogan “Only Smarties have the answer” using Archival Ink, and added the balloon images and flowers which are stickers and were chosen to match the colours of the sweets themselves. The letters and numbers are gel stickers which I arranged in a wave like pattern on the page. The hexagonal shapes which detail a letter and question are from the top of the new Smarties packaging – you will find the answers to the questions somewhere on the page too (Clue – the answers are always on the packaging somewhere). I like that it turned out so colourful and fun!
Here are the questions if you can’t read them (and the answers are detailed below too):
- What K do you boil water in?
- What N is a short sleep?
- What G is a place to keep cars?
To create this page I bought some Smarties to use the packaging, well it might have actually been for the chocolate too! Needless to say we enjoyed eating them whilst I completed my page! A number of things have changed about Smarties over the years, they used to come in a cylinder-shaped tube which had a plastic disc lid. After the Smarties were all gone it made a neat toy as you could “karate-chop” the tube to fire the lid across the room – I loved the popping sound of the plastic lid and seeing how far it went! Smarties no longer come in this packaging and the colours have changed too – there are now blue Smarties which I never had at school. If you want to learn more about Smarties and their history, which actually date back to 1937, here’s a link.
(The answers to the questions are – Kettle, Nap, Garage).
Thanks for joining me today! If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you.
Here is a list of all the materials used to create this art journal page:
- Colvin & Co Artist Acrylic (White Titanium)
- Memento Dye Ink (London Fog)
- Range Archival Ink (Jet Black)
- Spectrum Aqua Artist’s Marker (Navy)
- Uni Pin Fine Line Marker (Black 0.1mm)
- Uniball Signo gel pen (White)
- Dovecraft lower case alphabet stamps (WDW Alpha Stamp DCVW0030)
- Docrafts A5 clear stamp set (Alphas Folk DCE907115)
- Leon (X-large Colour Paper Pad)
- Home Bargains (Mini Gel Stickers 30287)
- Wilko stickers (Flower Embellishments)
- Home Bargains wall stickers (Fairy Door 34356)
- Hobbycraft Laser Stickers (Letters 5681871002)
- UHU Stic
- Zig Memory System 2-Way Glue (The Dual Action Glue Pen)
- The Range double-sided foam tape
- Nestlé Smarties packaging