Friday 5 August 2011

An experiment in vintage colours

I recently came across the work of Polish scrapbooker/artist Anna Dabrowska from the Prima design team (see her work here). I absolutely love the sense of colour and texture in her work - it's seriously gorgeous stuff!

Her work inspired me to try making a card using muted vintagey colours and layers of different textures.
The background was coloured with distress stains / inks (antique linen, vintage photo and victorian velvet) and then I built up a few layers of:
  • vellum - coloured with antique linen, stamped with the Tim Holtz Papillon background in a brown archival ink, torn into strips and edged with victorian velvet
  • Lace - stained with antique linen and swiped through a bit of victorian velvet on the craft sheet
  • Lace effect cream paper ribbon edged with victorian velvet
I swiped a few brush fulls of rock candy crackle paint over parts of the whole thing for extra texture.

The butterflies were cut out of fabric using a Tim Holtz movers and shapers die. The fabric I used was some little squares (perfect size for the dies) that were actually samples of suede sofa fabric I kept from ages ago when we were choosing a new sofa (I new they'd come in handy eventually) - I love the feel of them :0)

I mounted the panel onto a book page distressed with vintage photo distress ink, and then onto a card blank. Finally, I stamped Happy Birthday onto some left over scraps of the book page, painted with a little cream acrylic paint first to lighten the text in the background.

It's a different style than other things I've done and about half way through I thought it was a disaster, but I persevered and now I hope you'll agree it's not actually turned out half bad  :0)

Thanks for stopping by.
xx

3 comments:

  1. This is very pretty and well balanced,especially when you zoom in on the detail. I like the way you have echoed the book paper in the sentiments. Thanks for the link to Annas work. It is stunning and never again will I worry about putting too many elements on one card!x

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love this! I seem to be a sucker for butterflies anyway, but add some distressing and lace and I am inspired!

    ReplyDelete

Many thanks for reading and commenting on my blog. It's fantastic to get your comments and feedback xx