A bit of a play day

As you know, I was a very lucky girl and received a fabulous package of stencils recently which I had ordered from the very talented Michelle Ward over at Green Pepper Press . These goodies have been sat on my work bench calling me since they arrived and I was determined to find time to play with them today. It's been a very relaxed play day, it's not a class project and no deadlines or anything which makes playing for playings sake much more fun.

I have not touched my altered book since I taught that class last year so I thought I would use that to mess around in.

 

And mess around I did....I can't tell you how may layers of paint there are on these pages, I kinda lost count!!! Anyways, I'll talk you through a bit of the process.


I started by painting over the pages with Snowflake Fresco Finish, this acts just like a gesso, covering the surface of the slick pages, giving them a bit more tooth for more layers of paint to stick to but also gives a nice white, blank canvas so that you can see the true colour of the paint.

Paint the page with Very Berry and Butternut, smudging colours together in a random fashion.

Next I tore up some book pages to create a landscape, these were painted with Hey Pesto and the edges were darkened by sponging a bit of watered down Hyde Park using a small piece of cut'n'dry so that I could blend and soften the colours together. I love using the translucent paints, you can still see all the lovely text on my book pages showing through the paint. I allowed these to dry naturally before sticking them to my book with Claudine Hellmuth's Matt Multi Medium. I find that if you use your heat gun to hurry up the drying process with lightweight paper, it just wrinkles and buckles far too much.

Next step, start stencilling. I love this hexagon stencil by Crafters Workshop....this could well be my new favourite!! After mixing a dab of Little Black Dress into a puddle of Chocolate Pudding to make it more opaque, I sponged some random areas of my book using all the different size hexagons on this stencil. After drying this layer, I nudged the stencil a fraction over the original design to create a shadow (this is a technique that the uber talented Lynne Perrella taught at one of our Artsycrafts events, both Leandra and I use this technique all the time now) and sponged a layer of Vintage Lace over the top. This is such a beautiful and delicate colour but because it is opaque, it has great coverage, it even covered my Chocolate Pudding!

As you can see, I decided not to create a shadow on all the hexagons, I thought this would make it a lot more interesting. The next stencil I used is called Chunky Chevron and I used the Vintage Lace again for this stencil, taking the design down over part of the green hills to try and blend everything together for a more balanced look.

 

Now I got to use one of my new stencils from Green Pepper Press. Having sponged Vintage lace through it for the first layer, when it was dry, I used a small stencil brush and stippled a small amount of Hey Pesto around the edges to give the leaves a bit more definition.

 

 

I then inked up a small text stamp with Jet Black Archival ink and stamped it through the stencil to add a bit more interest.

 

 

I also did this through a few of the larger hexagons too.

 

 

Now the real fun begins, adding more translucent layers of paint, making sure that each layer is dry before adding the next layer. I added a bit more stencilling in different colours followed by more layers of paint until I felt I was achieving the look that I had in my head!

 

 

 

 

If you find that your background has become to vibrant and is in danger of becoming the foreground, you can always knock it back with a watered down pale colour of paint. That's what I decided to do here and I'm much happier with the background now.

 

 

By the time I got to this point, it was dark outside and it's not always easy to make final colour choices in artificial light, so at this point I decided to call it a day and go back to it again tomorrow when I will probably add a few more layers of translucent colours.  I love Claret, Pumpkin Soup and Hey Pesto and I am pretty sure that I will add a few shadows around the main images to bring them back to the foreground again.

 

 

 

If I decide to change it, I'll be sure to let you know.