Oriental Adventure

Hi All,

I have a canvas to show you today. Its a small (~A5) one that I've had hanging around for ages and has already undergone several incarnations. 

This time I've finally got something I like: A grungy, aged, oriental inspired design.

First I gessoed over the previous project, then gave it a bit of colour with tea dye and walnut stain distress ink. 

Next I took some packaging paper, crumpled it and smooshed it through the same distress inks watered down on the craft mat. I love doing this, it creates really lovely worn looking paper. I also splattered on some watered down DecoArt quinacridone gold acrylic paint. I glued torn strips to my canvas with gel medium.

I added an oriental bird image and some stamping with some Paperartsy stamps from a Hot Picks backgrounds set.

A thick layer of DecoArt one step crackle, and some DecoArt antiquing creams in black and red oxide, and it was finished.

I'd like to enter this into the Craft Stamper Take it Make it 'take a stamp' challenge. The stamping may not be the most obvious here, but It was very definitely necessary for the oriental feel and texture in this piece.

Thanks for reading,

Sarah x

Gelli and Stencils

Hi there, 

My lovely husband got me a Gelli Plate for my birthday a couple of months ago. Its so much fun to play with that I have made loads of prints, but haven't actually used many of them. The piece I want to show you started off as a print using acrylic paints (Sennelier Abstract Blue and DecoArts Media Quinacridone Violet) with an Andy Skinner stencil.

Looking for something to do with the print, I spotted a new sketch book and thought the print would make a lovely cover image.

I edged it using black neopastel, which mirrored the lovely rough texture of the print then added more layers of stencilling with neopastel and archival ink through some Crafters Workshop stencils (I love the Rebekah Meier ones!). Simple, but quite effective I think.

I'm going to enter this in the Thats Crafty 'stencils and masks' challenge and also a stencils challenge on the Mixed Media World blog which I have only just discovered.

Thanks for visiting, I hope to have more to show you soon.

Sarah xx