Monday 28 March 2016

Finnabair style canvas board.

HI Everyone, Brenda here. For today's make I took a canvas board I had made for another project and set about altering it. I really liked it like this but the finished article was not something I thought I would use so I took off the embellishments and set to work.


I took out my distress crayons and started smudging colours over the top ...


.... and then blended over picket fence distress paint and spritzed it with water.


I added more coloured crayons as well as white ...


... then dipped it into spritzed picket fence paint again before drying it and blending over squeezed lemonade, evergreen bough, mustard seed and picked raspberry distress inks.


Now it's completely changed we are ready to rock and roll.
Starting with the metals - some were gessoed and painted with decoart media acrylics, others were given the rusting treatment again using decoart media acrylics.


Here we have lace, wooden pieces and a corrugated heart.


The arch piece has a transfer waiting to be finished but I rubbed too hard and spoiled it so had to turn over and started again.


I layered up the pieces and began adhering them to the board using matte medium.


The sprayed with some misters and a glitz spray from my supplies.


Then added the final embellishments and the pretty girl on the arch.


Really rather pleased with this and reminds me of Finnabair's style. I will put an easel on the back and use it as one of my special cards.


Thanks for stopping by. I hope you are having a fabulous Easter weekend, even with the horrible rain and high winds we managed  a break in the clouds yesterday afternoon which was enough to do the Easter egg hunt and later had dinner with all the family - 9 of us this time.

Take care and enjoy the week ahead.

hugs Brenda xxx




Saturday 26 March 2016

Golden Stained Glass

Hello all.  Alison here from Words and Pictures and, as promised (threatened), I'm back with the PaperArtsy Fresco White Fire paint again.  This time it's some journalling pages, in search of that look of medieval illuminated manuscripts.


Of course the Lynne Perrella women are always good for evoking that sense of the Middle Ages, and these stained glass stamps remain my all-time favourites of hers, I think.


I simply can't resist all those intricate details which unfold as you look more closely...


But let's start at the very beginning (it is, after all, a very fine place to start), with some gesso'd book pages onto which I brayered layers of blue and green Fresco paints.


I kept the brayering fairly sparse, as I didn't want things to get too dark, and I did want to keep plenty of book text coming through too.


The final layer was some White Fire - just look at that sheen (yes, the paint was dry when I took the photo).


I stamped the two main images, facing one another, in Olive Archival.


I embossed the stamping with clear detail powder.  I like the shimmer and the dimensionality, and it's also really helpful when it comes to adding colour with the paints.


I apply my paints in watery washes so as to keep the translucent look of glass as much as possible.  It's different on these pages of course, because there's always the texture of the brayering there too.


To the colours above I've now added Blue Glass and Southern Skies, but my favourite thing is being able to add gilded touches with great precision and accuracy, as on the dots and lettering here and the tiny angel's halo.


If you look closely at my recent Head in a Book, you'll see it's much harder to get a neat finish when you're trying to "paint" with the Treasure Gold wax.  Having my favourite White Fire colour in paint form makes life so much easier - now this woman has gilded pearls around her neck and golden flowers to echo them.


I added the corner elements and painted them, but without adding any gold.  If you check out the stamp set, you'll see it's actually a straight segment, but stamped twice it makes a nice feature drawing the eye inwards.


I tinted the faces with Chalk, Blush and Autumn Fire paints, and then added in some medieval manuscript writing before starting with the splatter...


I've splattered in the same colours used for the brayering and colouring...


... and generally kept it to a sweep going diagonally across the pages.


A couple of Small Talk stickers provide the words.


They're outlined with watercolour pencils and some more washes of paint.


I added a couple of metallic leaf brads which echo the leaf shapes within the stained glass windows, and they got some actual White Fire Treasure Gold so that they would tone in with the pages.


And that's my medieval manuscript for you, using plenty of White Fire in search of illumination.


There's even extra White Fire paint framing the main images...


...and just look what happens when the light hits it and the embossing!


I hope you like them and thanks so much for stopping by today.


Remember, if you'd like to go shopping at Country View Crafts you can just click any of the links at the foot of the post.  Happy crafting all!

Alison x