Decorative Blocks for Home Décor Displays - DecoArt Media Team

This was my February project for the DecoArt Media blog.

All during my teaching career I loved designing and building displays of children’s work and general classroom displays to support teaching and learning and show children their hard work was valued. This love of exhibiting special treasures has been carried through to my home where shelves, sideboards, dressers etc. around my home have continually changing displays on them. I love making projects to add to them to give that personal touch. I have a couple of small collections of children’s vintage play blocks and have bought some new wooden ones to alter as well. What I like about this type of project is that it is so easy to get some lovely distressed and aged effects in a short time and with just a few basic colours of paint.

Instructions:

Step 1: 

Take all three wooden blocks, seal them with a coat of black gesso and because I wanted a shinier look I also gave them a coat of carbon black acrylic paint.

Step 2: 

Gather the collage elements for the large block to build the theme for the display. I have gone with transport/travel.

Step 3:

Please be very careful with these layers as repeated drying with the heat gun causes the blocks to get very hot and could burn to the touch.

Layer 1. Again take all three blocks and apply a wash of raw umber and dry. This creates a subtle distressed look.

Step 4:

Layer 2. Very lightly brayer some white paint randomly over all the surfaces, leave a lot of the dark background exposed. Dry.

Step 5: 

Layer 3. Dip and dry the surfaces with titan buff and burnt umber washes. Dry.

Step : 6

Put the two smaller blocks to one side. When the larger block is cool, build the collages on all four sides with the gathered collage pieces. Keep the collages simple so as not to lose the lovely distressed look you have already achieved.

Step 7:

Take the metal embellishments (a clock and a spinner) and alter with gold paint. Then secure it to the top.

Step 8: 

Layer 4. Go back to the smaller blocks. Take a small text stamp and titan buff acrylic paint to add a small amount of words/numbers to all the sides.

I am building small collections of different colours and just love this combination.

xxx

Revisiting old techniques - Distress layers with stamping

Here's another of my techniques and layer combinations using acrylic paints. I like to turn to these when needing some inspiration and I have been documenting them on media boards as a resource.

You will find them added to my Tutorials and step x steps page found on my sidebar.

This one - distress layers with stamping- I demoed at Stitches in January 2019.

Process Steps

1. Seal substrate with tinting base 

2. Dip, dab and dry each layer.  Layer 1 watery raw umber.. Layer 2 Add cobalt blue to mix. 

Layer 3 Mix cobalt blue and titan buff. 4 Add titanium white to the mix. 

3. Text stamp randomly over the background using hydrangea archival ink.

 4. Blend titanium white through a stencil. 

5.  Add next layer – mix wash of  paynes grey and titanium white – 

paint over and dab off with kitchen towel) 

6. Stamp bold figure with watering can and black archival ink - I used a stamp platform to get a good image.

7. Stamp text/numbers with white paint.

8. Sand and paint/spritz the edges using paynes grey mixed with raw umber.

That's another board in the resource box.

xxx

Revisiting old techniques - Distressed Gesso Layer

I've devised a number of techniques and layer combinations using acrylic paints over the years and I am returning to them for inspiration and to document them on media boards as a resource.

You will find them added to my Tutorials and step x steps page found on my sidebar.

This one - Distressed Gesso Layer - I taught at Ministry of Mixology in April 2019.

Process steps

1. Paint the substrate with any colour acrylic or chalk paint and before it is totally dry rub over it with a dry kitchen towel, this dries it quickly so you don't need a heat gun. I used Andy's Grey Haze

2. Take some gesso and a palette knife. Hold the palette knife horizontally flat over the substrate and gently drag the gesso over the surface. Don’t push down too hard. 

3. Repeat several times turning the substrate round in different directions to get an even random coverage and dry. Once dry you could add another layer of on top if you wanted more texture. 

4. Stamp some text over the top using archival ink and make sure it is dry before repeating step 2 again. but only using a very little gesso. This distresses and cuts up the text and pushes it into the background.

5. Dabble some watery prussian blue over the surface spritz with more water to move it about and hold up the substrate to let it drip then lay down again and just give it a little time for the watery colour to settle in the channels and dips before heat drying it,

6. Repeat with a little more watery wash but adding more blue to make it a deeper colour.

7. Finish by adding some splatters using the last of that deeper watery wash.

You can leave the 'clean' look or 'frame' the edges like I have on the Scraped Gesso Layer 

(see tutorials list on sidebar).

I also splattered some silver over the background and onto some grey haze painted stars to finish the board. 

Rust Technique - Andy Skinner paints

Been playing with just a few of Andy's paint range to create this rust effect.

1. With a palette knife drag some thin areas of white gesso still leaving some of the greyboard exposed.

2. Stencil using Andy's structure paste. Dry.

3. Rub over grey using dry kitchen roll. Dry.

4. Dabble and spritz with rust, let wash move around on the board. Dry.

5. Repeat #4 with mustard seed and also splatter a little. Dry.

6. Repeat #5 with grey.

7. Paint over a layer of quin gold. Dry

8. Repeat #4 with quin gold and rust mixed.

9. Repeat #4 with rust.

10. Repeat #4 with magenta and mustard seed mixed.

11. Repeat #7.

xxx

Andy Skinner products

Artist Pigment Paints - Grey, Rust, Quinacridone Gold, Primary Magenta

Matt Chalk Paint - Mustard Seed

Structure Paste

Out of limitations comes creativity - Skype session

Last Friday I had another fabulous skype crafty session with lovely friends Nikki Acton and Alison Bomber.  We have these sessions every now and again where we capitalise on having a longish space of time to work cooperatively together. Our previous encounters have seen us choose the 'next steps' in turn but Nikki pushed us to do something completely different this time. We agreed to work on tags and to collect our materials together first and then allow ourselves the freedom to just create with the limited supplies.

Each of us could pick two things to work with. It went like this - Nikki - 4 colours of paint,  Alison - a stamp set  Brenda - a stencil, Nikki - any item purchased/acquired recently, Alison - 4 colours of ink,  Brenda - your choice of die-cuts/punches. 

We gathered our choices together and showed each other what we had chosen and also agreed we could have a wild card to choose one other thing along the way and each of us could you each others' choices as well as our own. These ended up with Nikki choosing a white posca pen,  Alison chose Words  and I chose rub-ons.

Here were my choices -

Andy Skinner stamps and paints

Tim Holtz dies/die-cuts

And so off we went creating our own masterpieces, deciding our own steps as we went along and  even though we were in lockdown, we could still enjoy each others' company.

I took a few photos straight from the desk, so not the best!

The tags were sealed with the white paint, blended with  grey haze and brayered with mustard seed.

Next I used a palette knife to scrape on titanium white and then mixed some of that with leftover grey haze and splattered it all over before again using the brayer and white.

I used my stencil and created patterns on each tag using different colours and used the stamps also with paint to add more interest

I brayered a little more white, sanded the edges and blended in burnt umber drawing ink.

I took the die-cut wildflowers and used all the paints to create washes to colour them up and I also brayered white over a few of the blooms.

The borders were give the same treatment as the flowers and I die-cut the wreaths from coredinations papers.

As we were coming towards the finishing stage I used words as chosen by Alison and some rub-ons that I chose as my wild card.

We all agreed we could add some twine in the tag holes and once finished I found there was only one thing I didn't use and that was the bird die.

Thank you to both Alison and Nikki for their time and contributions to the day and making it fun to create with each other on video calling.

If you would like to see both their finished tags you can find them here

Nikki

Alison

 Please pop over and leave some love.

xxx