Mixed media collage card.

Today I am over on the 'A Vintage Challenge' blog with a step by step showing how I made this card.

If you would like to see all the details please click the link HERE.

  I have  shown the process steps for the background which is made using DecoArt Media paints and mediums but you could use any acrylics and similar mediums you have at home.

xxx



Updated from AVJ

Mixed media can mean different things to different people but basically it is about using various types of products (media) on the same piece of work and describes a genre of art work.
Here I have used paints, gesso, inks, paper and fabric to create my mixed media card.

1. Cut a piece of canvas to fit the size of my card (5 x 5).

2. With a palette knife and white gesso very lightly drag some across the canvas keeping the palette knife horizontal with the surface.

3. To add colour use cadmium red hue, titanium white, titan buf and burnt umber DecoArt media acrylics to make vintage pink and with very tiny amounts on a paint palette use a wetwipe and a water spritzer to rub colour on.

When dry  mix another shade of darker vintage pink, add some water so it is the consistency of single cream and spread it across your craft mat. Dip the canvas randomly and dry to get a mottled effect. Keep the leftovers.

Repeat the last step by mixing a very light vintage pink.

With the leftover dark pink stamp some text over the background. The paint sinks in and gives you a blurry text.

Mount on another piece of card or patterned paper and adhere to the card.

4. Use ephemera and patterned papers to cut and tear pieces to build a collage. As you have it layered up starting at the top take each piece and glue it to the piece underneath in your chosen design to create your layered collage piece.

Adhere this to the background.

Optional - Cover the focal image and add some splattering with slightly pink watery paint.

5. Find some simple embellishments - as this is pink and flowery I chose some little mini flowers, created a bow from paint dyed vintage style ribbon, added the circular piece for more interest and made a greeting from remnant rubs and ink splattered paper.

Adhere these to the card.

I always ink the edges of my papers with brown distress ink and also added some gesso and ink to the flowers.

Eh voila you have a beautifully layered card that (hopefully) is still thin enough to go in the post (I'm keeping my fingers crossed).

All the pieces have very similar tones leaving the focal ephemera piece to really stand out.

I hope you have enjoyed reading through and if you love collage like I do maybe it will inspire you to get out the paints, papers and ephemera to have a go for yourself.

Shabby Autumn Frame

I have a new project and tutorial over on the DecoArt blog today. As it's now Autumn I took that as a  theme with the idea of using leaves and came up with this. More like winter isn't it? - But that's where my muse took me lol.

There's embossing, painty mixed media layers and a faux encaustic finish to the middle of it.

All the details and lots more photos can be found on the DecoArt Mixed Media Blog HERE.

 

xxx

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Dreamer of Skype Dreams

Last week three of us had a fabulous crafting day together on Skype. Nikki (aka Addicted to Art), Alison (aka Words and Pictures) and myself spent just over 5 hours creating a project with each of us giving the instructions for the process steps, taking it in turns. At the end we had the big reveal to see what each of us had created and oh boy they were so different.

Here is my sample - a 20 x 29 1/2 cm mdf board which is actually the base from my Mixology frame kit cut by Tando Creative. Nikki and Alison had extra large tags to use.
B = Brenda, A = Alison and N = Nikki

I'm giving you the instruction and what I did to interpret it.

B - Seal substrate with gesso

N - Use some texture paste any way you wish. - texture paste and stencil

A - Dilute one colour of paint and apply in any way you choose - I mixed titan buff on a foil palette, daubed it onto the background

B - Add crackle in anyway you want - I poured weathered wood crackle medium randomly over the background and then scraped with a palette knife and heat dried.

We decided we needed a bit of time to start to gather embellishments also giving time for the crackle to dry.

N - Add texture to one or more of the embellishments - I gessoed the dress form and added texture sand paste to it.

A - Add colour to one or more of your embellishments. - Taking the dress form I painted it with a simple rust technique (pounce raw umber, paynes grey and quinacridone gold, heat dry. Dip in watery washes of the same colours).

B - Create a panel to use in making layers - I used a piece of mountboard, sealed with gesso then gave it some watery dips in  burnt sienna, titan buff, raw umber and titanium white. Flicks of sap green then mixed with prussian blue and flicked as well.

N - Apply a coat of paint to the background any way you like. I took grey and white premium painting randomly over the whole surface but crackles didn't appear so I improvised and painted over the areas where the weathered wood was with white crackle paint. I had some lovely bits of mega crackle appear.

A - Time to stamp - Alison said 'it's in your hands' but pure stamping only over the background. - I had out some old but never used stamps. Taking an artstamp from carabelle studio 'une plume sur mon carnet' I used paynes grey acrylic paint to stamp with.

B - Dip, drip and dry watery washes. This is my most used technique and I simply used titan buff. 

N - Edge in whatever way you want. I blended ground espresso and spritzed water over then dried it three times. I then sealed with DecoArt matte acrylic spray.

A - Trial your composition and design and finalise embellishments.

B - Do an Alison and add some words.

N - Add a touch of metallic. I used gold metallic lustre on a number of the metal embellishments and painted it onto the dress part of the dress form.

A - Splatter. - I used watery titanium white and splattered all over the background before I glued my elements on.

I used a Tim Holtz frame and paper dolls and the panel became my background for it.

 You can just see some of the crackle in the background above the frame and on the right side edge.
I love how the texture turned out with the stencil design. Towards the end, to bring it to life, I just rubbed a ground espresso ink pad over the top of the raised modeling paste.

The penultimate  instruction from Nikki was to use metallic - at first she had said gold before making it broader so it would fit each of our projects - I continued with the gold as the line around the inside of the frame looks like an old gold colour. I think this really lifted the whole look and helped bring the embellishments together.

I found the dress form die-cut in a box and after the sand texture paste, the brown paints the gold also lifted the dress part and makes it stand out. The ribbon and bow cuts in half to take away some of the prominence it had.

Lastly I felt the overall design didn't quite balance  so I added a little tissue tape and remnant rubs (the stars) to achieve the composition I desired.

To see the other two projects please pop over to Nikki's blog - Addicted to Art and Alison's blog - Words and Pictures.

I didn't get much time for photos and don't have one of me or Alison - sorry Alison but here's a flavour of the day. We had chatty times, lots of laughter and some silences where we were concentrating hard on what we were doing. We also disappeared from screen when we needed to find something or wash something, it didn't matter, the whole day was brilliant.

 I love Nikki's face here enjoying the reveal at the end - that's Alison's project.

We already have another day booked so stay tuned for another Skype session in a few weeks.

 

xxx

Steampunk clock shabby style.

Today I am sharing the steampunk clock I had published in the Craft Stamper earlier this year over on the Tando Creative Blog.

 The frame is covered with a crackle texture that has been coloured mixed media style....

.... and the background has layers of DecoArt media acrylics used as washes and some Andy Skinner stamps.

 

More photos and the process steps are available over on the Tando blog where I have added them as part of my Texture Week sample.

 

xxx

Follow In My Footsteps - Fossil panel plus.....

Firstly, although she doesn't read my blog I wish my gorgeous daughter a wonderful and happy birthday.

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I used the instructions for one of the panels I made for Stitches, back in February, and created this Andy Skinner fossil fish tile with a computer generated caption to go with it. To follow the footsteps you need to see the panel I made here. This panel was made around the same time as the linked one and has been sitting in a box so I decided to give it a second lease of life and used it to make a hand made / hand bound sketch book / journal. The paints and mediums I used are all DecoArt media line and the stamps are by Andy Skinner.

I revamped an old technique that Tim Holtz got me into I think in 2011. I revised it when I first started teaching workshops but now updated it again.

I started with this previously made panel.

Using my technique it changed to this ......

.... and then this.

I call this Pitted Enamel and I'm keeping the written steps for a DecoArt Media Team contribution which will be sometime in November, so please keep your eyes peeled for an update.

Once the front cover for my sketchbook/journal was finished I moved on to making the insides. I cut media paper to size, folded the pieces into folios and put two folios to make a signature. I repeated this four times and then sewed the signatures together making a text block using a kettle stitch
binding. I found this video HERE pretty useful but I didn't go on to gluing the edges of the signatures.

 I covered the spine with a gaffa type tape before adhering the front and back pages to the front and back covers.

Just some simple coloured twine for holding the book together ......

.... and what started out as a simple panel has become the cover of a useful sketch, watercolour, note book and is in my shop space to sell.

Thanks for stopping by.

Trust your wings

Back to Nature with AVJ

It's a new challenge at A Vintage Journey and the lovely Jennie is hosting this month and she has asked us to celebrate natural elements in our projects. I've focussed on some real nature with my dried seed heads, dried grass and twig from the garden and used a flower stamp, metal embellishment and worn wallpaper to depict these wonderful elements as well.

Base

Take a canvas board and blend dip and flick distress oxides to cover it.

When dry brayer a very light coat of white gesso over.

Stamp flower with embossing ink and heat emboss with weathered wood distress powder and repeat over the same place with vintage gold to give a textured embossing effect.

Sand the edges and ink with ground espresso DI.

Panel

Cover an mdf or greyboard panel with worn wallpaper, sand the edges and ink with ground espresso DI.

Seal with DecoArt decoupage sealer or matte medium.

Paint over with a layer of gesso and  immediately rub some of it away and leave more of the gesso around the edges.

Tie a distressed ribbon around it.

Frame

Take a small Tim Holtz frame - again sand the edges and ink with ground espresso DI.

Assemble

Offset the panel and frame to provide space for the gathered natural elements tied together with string. This becomes the main focal point.

Add a small paper doll photo to add as a secondary focal point.

Alter some small metal embellishments to add as decoration and additional interest

The sections build great layers and height.

For some more amazing inspirational projects on this theme please pop over to the AVJ challenge blog to see what the other Creative Guides have made. As always there's a brilliant line up.

xxx

Colour theme for Tando Creative

We start the new week with a colour scheme over on the Tando Creative blog.

Here is the inspirational photo for the colour palette.

These are the DecoArt colours I picked out of my media acrylic paints.

Brush white gesso onto the tag and squidge it onto a craft mat or some acetate to get some texture for the background. (I will admit here right at the beginning that this is my third try at getting something I liked and each time it went wrong I gessoed over and squidged it again. Waste not want not!)

Dip, dip and dry several times using watery washes of mixed tones of dark grey, medium grey, sap green, titanium white and titan buff media acrylic paints to achieve a misty background and foggy day.

Stamp some grassy foliage using the same colours as used for the dipping above and dry. Then repeat with mixes of pyrrole red, yellow oxide, titanium white and titan buff using the same foliage stamp.

Sand the edges and blend in ground espresso distress ink.

Dab a little of all the colours, bar the greys and black, onto a mixing palette and using mini leaves 3 drag several of the leaves through the colours and dry and then stamp over using a textured leaf stamp .....

and edge with coffee archival.

From the 'Textures 1' sheet extract the word 'imagination' and part of the 'harlequin' shape. Paint the word black and the harlequin a dark burgundy (the 3 colours you will need to mix it are red, blue and black) and stamp with the light grey paint.

Time to assemble - gather any other bits you want to add, especially some nice natural elements.

I also added some washi tape to the bottom.

Eh voila!

Once I'd got the first stamping done I knew I was going to be happy with this, I really quite like it. You may have noticed that I even took the photo as well as the colours for my inspiration and I loved grunging up the natural elements.

 If you'd like to see more fab projects inspired by the colours keep your eye on the Tando Creative blog this week.

xxx