Dreaming of butterflies

I fancied trying out a technique from this months Craft Stamper magazine using tissue to build up layers of images and texture, and I just got some Tim Holtz distress stains so I wanted to try them out too.

I started off with a canvas board and swiped it over with the distress stains in wild honey, fired brick and walnut stain. I cut some pieces of heavy TH music print paper using the TH scrollwork on the edge die and coloured these with the wild honey stain before glueing onto the canvas.

Next I added a single layer of tissue over the whole canvas, soaking it on with diluted PVA glue. It wrinkles in places to add texture, and I worked it in around the scrollwork pieces so that they still appear slightly raised. The pattern on the paper is also still visible through the tissue.

Then I stamped my various images (stamps from Paperartsy, Tim Holtz, Debbi Moore) onto more pieces of tissue in black stazon  and glued them onto the canvas in the same way. Thanks to Florence at florenceandfreddie.wordpress.com for the tip of stamping with a layer of foam underneath the tissue for a better print - hop over to her blog to see some gorgeous bottles decorated using a stamped tissue technique.

Once it was all dry, I added some extra colour with the stains and a few more butterflies in black archival ink. Finally I rubbed some gold rub-on colour around the edges and lightly over the rougher bits to emphasize the texture. Oh and at some point I sprayed some heirloom gold perfect pearls over it.

Not too bad for a first attempt I think - the colours look better in real life too.

This last photo is just an ATC I was using to test out some of the techniques before using them on the main canvas, but I quite liked the way it turned out (even if the butterflies have smudges because I used distress ink then went over the top with more glue).

Sarah
xx