Proudly Canadian

Proudly Canadian

Sunday, January 4, 2015

A little help from my friends...

Hello again!  ;)  It has been far to cold to leave the house.  If you are anywhere in Canada right now you are probably sympathizing right now.  Holy cold!  I really was planning on doing some grocery shopping today, but hey... who needs to eat!  I'd rather be warm.  LOL  So, I took advantage of the time at home and got my tree down, did a tiny amount of cleaning and then well....my craft room was calling my name every time I walked past, so a person can only say no a few times before the craft room wins.  LOL

You know how I mentioned the other day about loving the napkins for decoupaging... today it certainly wasn't working in my favor.  Each time I tried to fix it I was making it worse.  Oh my....good thing perseverance won.  Still not my favorite finish but it did help the end result to some degree.  I like the idea of the page though.  I took many different inspirations from Pinterest ranging from France Papillon to Roben-Marie Smith and threw in my own twist.  :)


I started to prep my page with a script stamp from Indigo Blue and used 4 different colors of archival ink to create a variegated background in colors.  I then took some gesso and a credit card and created random swipes with the gesso so as not to cover the whole page.  I then took two Distress sprays in Scattered Straw and Rusty Hinge in isolated areas and water to cause the color to spread.  You can see around the edges where there was no gesso cause the color is darker and really soaked into the paper.  I used gelatos around the edges in chocolate and in blue aqua.  I took my napkin image that I cut out and used my matte medium to decoupage it down.  This is where the fun began.  The medium which is water based started to pick up the spray color from below and it smeared and really darkened my napkin image so that the light sepia look I was going for ended up almost disappearing into the background.  Grrrr... so, lets take another image and cut it out and put it directly over top once it was dry and then there should be anymore color to smear and maybe the image would show up better.  Nope... hmmmm.  So, brilliant me thought OK, I'll take another napkin and use the three layers instead of the one and seal that down at one time so that the white of the other two layers would lighten up the look.  Well... I got bubbles and bumps and the image really didn't appear much lighter.  In fact, it looked worse... much worse.  Oh man... I was going to leave it but then thought, well if I do a white gesso wash overtop of the image and cut out another single sheet of the image and seal that down overtop of the white wash then for sure it would be lighter!  Ah huh... SUCCESS!!!  Except now there is this white halo effect around the image.  After I had already snapped the photo I did go back in once it was dry and used my FC Pitt pen in brown and shade the white out a bit so that it integrated into the background better.  I then sealed down the baking soda can images in the other corner.  I wanted to do circles and used my Finnibar stencil to create large circles with my acrylic white paint.  I used gelatos to shade in the same blue and an orange inside the circle.  I used black gelato to shade around the circles.  I decided I needed more circles.  So I took the same stencil and some molding paste and laid down smaller circles.  Once dry, I used the gelato blue aqua again to color the smaller circles and I outlined them with a light sepia charcoal pencil and a stump to blend.  Looking at the picture I think I might go back and add some gesso or white acrylic paint overtop of the smaller blue circles to lighten them up a bit.  Last I took my sentiment stamp and inked with archival ink.

I really wanted more white space than I ended up with but that's ok.  I'm trying to incorporate more white space into some of my pages.  I really have this tendency to fill in all the gaps.  I love how it looks when other artists do pages with white space.  I need a bit more practice in that department.  Keep practicing I guess.

If you popped in from facebook or pinterest to take a look at my blog I'd love to hear from you.  Leave a message for me and say Hi.  Would love to hear from you.  Have a great night and maybe I'll be able to find some time to do another page this next week.  :)


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