Tweet, tweet!

Well this post has certainly been a long time coming, mainly down to no time to create anything that isn't for a workshop, a make & take or a display board. Finally, last week as I was chopping up cardboard boxes for the compactor I had a smidge of an idea for a project using JOFY15 stamps.

 

I peeled some of the layers of the cardboard flap to reveal all the ridgy bits and covered the whole surface in gesso - this gave me a bit of a key and kept the colours true when I swiped a random assortment of Distress Paints onto the surface working it into the ridges witha baby wipe - what did we ever do without those!

 

I stamped out the birdhouses and birdies onto some scraps of white card, coloured them with a water brush and Distress Markers and cut them out. I then stamped Hero Arts S5601 Newspaper Backround onto more scrap card and over stamped it with the leaves from the JOFY plate. I coloured these in as before, cut them out and shaped them a bit too.

 

Then it was simply stamping the branches from the same plate onto my base, again coloured with Distress Markers and arranging all the bits I had cut out. I had a couple of empy spaces so I stamped and inked the 'tweet,tweet from the stamp set and filled the gaps. Some googly eyes, garden twine and a bit of spare black mountboard late and I was done.

 

I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself and how quickly this little project came together from scraps. Very satisfying to my mean Scottish blood!

 

Will try not to leave it so long next time xx 

Experiments with Distress Paints Part 2

Hello, back again as promised with a different technique with the scrummy new Distress Paints from Ranger.

Here's what I used on each sample ......

 

.....Distress Paints in Bundled Sage, Victorian Velvet, Antique Linen, Weathered Wood & Broken China, Treasure Gold in White Fire and a credit card style hotel room key.

 

I have just started (another) journal, this time a smaller A5 size so I can take it on holiday - no immediate plans but a girl can dream can't she! It has thinner paper than either of my current A4 journals so I was a bit worried about paint seeping through from one page to the next so I thought I'd try scraping the paint onto the page really thinly (with the hotel room card of course) to avoid this and two things happened.....

 

 

Firstly, the paint dried almost instantly and one of the features of DP is that once it's dry it is permanent, and secondly, the paint was so transluscent you could clearly see all the colours I used in the layers underneath. Oh my I liked that and found it was true on the texture paste bits through a Prima stencil too..

 

 

...and here's the finished journal pages

 

 

...with stamps from JOFY's Spring Collection from PaperArtsy stamped in Tsukineko's Versafine in Onyx Black and some detail picked out with an Inkessential's White Pen.

 

It set me thinking about what would happen if I added the paint slightly more thickly...

 

 

.....still transluscent but slightly less so.

 

 

I finished with texture paste again through a stencil from Prima, stamped with a fabulous image from Chocolate Baroque's new Punky Flowers plate and WOW's Platinum Detail Embossing Powder with a touch of Treasure Gold. Nice effect.

 

Finally my 'what if's' led me to applying the paint more thickly still but then it didn't dry so quickly and....

 

 

...I loved this effect.

 

Still some transparent bits showing off the layers below, but solidly opaque in other areas with the wetter layers scraped back off in parts so texture colour and layers. Heaven. I finished off with the same stamp, stencil etc as the earlier experiment and turned it into a really clean & simple card.

 

So, I learned Distress Paints .......

 

don't have to be grungy - you can keep all the layers pastel,

don't have to be opaque - you can scrape it on thinly and have transluscent layers,

don't have to be used with water - not a drop used here,

don't have to be applied with a brush - just add the paint directly to an old plastic card,

don't have to be dried between layers - semi dry doesn't mix to create mud and does give texture! 

 

That's all for now, be back Saturday with Part 3 of my Distress Paint Experiments - so many products to play with research, so little time.

 

Thanks for looking, hope you enjoyed xx