More 'Lockdown' creative time

Thank you to Alison (Words and Pictures) and Nikki (Addicted to Art) for another fabulous creative and chatty session on Sunday. We all worked on our journals with me creating a panel to add to a collage in my vintage journal.

I have to say having a couple of crafting buddies who ca get together in this way gives us a very therapeutic window of time in this pandemic lockdown and provides us with an opportunity to catch up and enjoy just being with other people we know and love.

The background panel started with a layer of tinting base scraped across a piece of card with some washes of burnt sienna, raw umber, paynes grey and titan buff and dried before adding the stars. These were created with one of Tim's shifter stencils and the above colours as well as quinacridone gold, raw sienna. burnt umber, carbon black, titanium white and pyrrole red. I used a small blending tool and foam to layer the colours through randomly.

I started collecting some pieces together to begin the collage .....

...... working just on the panel to begin with. 

When I was happy with that I then brought together more oddments to build the page collage. All of the bits are from snippet boxes I keep, both of papers, words, fabrics and die-cuts. I love using up leftovers in this way.

If you have a moment please pop over to see the fabulous designs by my lovely intrenet companions.

Nikki

Alison

xxx

Revisiting old techniques - watery layers with wax resist

I'm still going back to old layering paint techniques and adding other layers to them. This time I also mixed my paints for nearly every layer, I just love experimenting with colours to see what appears.

Process steps

1. Seal substrate with gesso.

2. Mix dark pinky red using quin red, titan buff, titanium white, burnt umber, paint layer over the whole surface, splatter water droplets, heat a little, soak up excess water with kitchen roll.

3. Repeat by adding diarylide yellow and pyrrole red to the left over mix.

4. Repeat by adding titan buff, titanium white to the mix.

5. Rub wax over the surface, paint a layer of titanium white only, heat gently and rub away with kitchen roll. If not enough rubs away  carry on heating small areas and rubbing in the opposite direction until you are happy with it.

6. Repeat step 5 several times by lightening the colour each time and also experiment with not heat drying the surface at the end.

 Having got the painty layers for your background - you could go on to add more layers with some stamping ..............

 ............. transfers or rub-ons .............

........ some die-cuts ...........

............... some stamped ephemera or images ..........

................... a vintage photo ....................

...... or maybe a completely different set of further layers. These were just for ideas.

xxx

A shorter Skype session with friends - mixed media board

Last Saturday my great skyping buddies Nikki (Addicted to Art) and Alison (Words and Pictures) and I met together for a short, just for fun 'do what you want', session to keep our hand in with creating and making and at the same time had a lovely catch-up.

I decided to use four words to work with that come from the first four days of the Creative Expressions FaceBook Mixed Media Mayhem challenges for May. Bright, Crackled, Stencilled and Distressed.

I created a background of brayered layers of Andy's chalk paints and white gesso adding in some stamping (that more or less got covered up :o) ).

The CREATE was stencilled using white texture paste and when perfectly dry I replaced the stencil and dabbed some of the chalk paints over it to help it blend with the background and outlined it with white posca pen. 

I painted the industrial wing with the  mustard and ocean breeze paints, let it dry then scraped some clear crackle glaze in random places. When that was dry I painted on white antiquing cream, left it to dry and rubbed away to reveal the cracks. Next I stamped with the grey haze.

A small round circular piece of Tando greyboard was painted with grey haze and titanium white paint mixed and Andy's eye transfer rubbed on.

The flaming heart was painted with grey haze, wash od the haze and white dabbled on, stamped with white tinting base and then splattered with ocean breeze and haze mixed.

I just used my fingers to add layers of the paints to the ring and splattered with grey haze.

      

Once put together =

It would be great if you popped over to see the other two projects - we had no theme this time - just to do what we liked, so these are very different. Here are their sneak peeks.

Nikki

Alison

xxxx

Products used

Andy Skinner Chalk Paints by Creative Expressions - Ocean Breeze, London Brick, Grey Haze, Mustard Seed.

Andy Skinner embellishments by Tando Creative - Industrial Wings, Flaming Heart

Andy Skinner stencil (Inspire) and stamp (Create)

Andy Skinner Transfers - Poe Diversity

DecoArt - Clear Crackle glaze, White Gesso, Tinting base, White Antiquing Cream, Titanium White Media acrylic paint

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.