Acrylic Stack and Use a Quote

I have been playing with my first acrylic stack from That's Crafty for my AVJ sample this month. Our challenge is all about adding a quote and the lovely Jenny is our host and says -

"Take a quote ! Any quote ! Whether it be on a stamp, a sticker, handwritten or sourced from the internet and make it the focal point of your vintage; shabby; mixed media; art journaling; industrial, timeworn or steampunk project."

Laura from That's Crafty very kindly sent us all a substrate to work with but I had already bought this stack and had started it for another challenge (and like you do - I changed my mind) and picked it up to finish it for this one.

So I began by stamping the girls and my quote on the top of the first layer of acrylic and on the second layer of acrylic I stamped the building - for both of them I used black stazon. You can still see the plastic protection on the underneath layers.

When these were dry I turned them over and painted the images only on the back. (Apologies for the photos - they were taken in a light tent but there was so much light that caused reflections that even manipulating them in PSE didn't work). This is the top side once painted - a note to remember - when painting on acrylic keep the colours more opaque, lighter in colour and thinner. I used media fluid acrylics some of which were opaque, some semi-translucent and some translucent so you can see through them.

Here's what it looked like on the underside - quite a mess but that's no problem as you can see by the photo above.

I laid this top piece over the second and decided to take the next step ........

 ..... which was to block the coloured paints with a layer of gesso so you can't see through the translucent ones.

For the second piece of acrylic I painted the buildings using a watery wash and that's how it continued for all the next steps, I painted on some watery translucent white paints to look a bit like clouds (you can't really see them here with a white background underneath) and gently heat dried it and then some dirty greeny brown colours at the bottom to ground the buildings.

 

For the third and last layer of the acrylics I just gently dabbled on some watery blue paints  in layers drying between each to give me a sky background.

I wanted to stamp the chipboard backing but I thought that might be a bit of overkill so I just dabbled on some watery brown paint.

This was a great lesson in perspective and layers .....

..... but I think I would approach it very differently next time in terms of the stamps I choose, it would benefit from images that are much more open - but then that's part of the making isn't it - learning what goes right and what you learn from what goes wrong?

Here's the stack put together straight as the layers were finished ......

.... and here after I had embellished it a bit using quinacridone gold to make all the added bits look a bit rusty and hanging in my hallway.  

I used DecoArt media acrylic paints, the paperboy set of stamps by Artistic Outpost and black stazon ink.

I hope we will see you over at the AVJ challenge during May (oh my gosh we are a third of the way through the year already) and thanks for stopping by here today.

Have a great weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx