Monday, April 14, 2014

I believe

Happy Monday!  I wanted to share a little project I've been working on lately, I have been wanting to do an altered canvas for ages and when I came across this little 5x7 canvas while cleaning my room I obviously stopped cleaning and started playing!

The original idea I had included masking and modeling paste only to discover my modeling paste was all but dried out!  So instead I pulled out my palette knife and spread some of the drying paste over my blank canvas for some texture.

I hadn't really settled on a theme yet so color schemes were a bit up in the air but in the end I opted for my fall back, golds, greens and blues.  I raided my tattered angels stash and used Medallion, Kiwi, Caper Green and Verdigris glimmer mists across the entire canvas, tilting it around to cause running and pools.  I let those sit and dry up before, repeating until I was happy, then I went around the edges with Dirty Martini glimmer glam.  

 To frame it a bit more I used a dark green faber castell gelato and used my finger to blend it in.  To add a bit more texture and add some shimmer I mixed some gold pigment powder into soft gel and used it over a damask stencil from Prima.  I really wanted to give it a shimmer so once the soft gel was mostly dry I used some dry pigment powder and rubbed it onto the soft gel.

To lighten it up a bit I went back over with my favorite bubble wrap and some white acrylic paint.  


I was so excited about how this was turning out that I really started worrying about, as my husband puts it, how I was 'going to land this bird safely'. Which in a round about way helped me come up with a theme.

I broke into our tissue paper stash looking for a nice 'earthy' tissue to use and found the tissue that came in the box for my husband's Keens and inked it up with the tree stencil from The Crafter's Workshop.


The texture and thickness of the tissue was perfect, and if you look closely you can still see the Keen logo from the backside.  But this became a cute little dress but I wasn't sure how to get this onto my canvas, was it hanging, being worn-end the end I decided it should be on a dress form.


I used the Tim Holtz movers and shapers dress form and the wings from his Heart Wings die on chipboard.  I was only interested in the top and bottom of the dress form since the dress would cover up the rest of it.


The dress form pieces were embossed using vintage photo embossing powder and inked over with black soot to give it the aged look and the wings were dabbed with gold acrylic to add some texture.  I used teal and green perfect pearls to pounce on some shimmer and edged them in Viva's Inka Gold Graphite.

I finished it up with a few leaves from a Prima vine and an embossed metal butterfly from Graphic 45 and I was able to sit back and let it take flight!


Do you believe?

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Back with a splash!!!

And a spritz...

Some of you may know that my beloved Archiver's closed its doors on February 15th.  And while it has been very sad that it is no more, I am grateful for the experience, along with all the forever friends and crafty knowledge I have gained from this wonderful place.


On the bright side I have free time again!  Which means I have finally been catching up on all of those projects piling up in my craft cave.

One of the biggest perks to not running from one job to another has been getting to try all those new products I obtained from Archiver's.  Like the new(ish) Naturally Aged paint systems from Tattered Angels.  I had played around a bit with them prior to this, but only in demos and have been sitting on several sets now since they came out.

The one I was most anxious to use was the Weathered Copper set, gorgeous!  I have a couple of projects to share all using this set.  

The first is a page I've been sitting on a for quite a while.  The papers are from the Kaiser Craft's Miss Empire line, I fell in love with the colors and the designs and the print is one of my favorite art nouveau prints.  

I had the photo mat done first and a rough idea of how I wanted the final page to look like, but I just couldn't get it to the next level.  In the end I did some splatter painting with turquoise paint and some drops of coconut glimmer glaze just to give it some color.  

As I was playing with the Weathered copper tattered angels set it hit me that this was exactly what I wanted on my page.  The circle frame I used on the page is a pressed paper frame from Heidi Swapp and it was perfect for the glimmer mists.  A couple of feathers tucked behind and I was finally happy calling it done!


After finishing spritzing my frame I had a lot of left over color on my craft sheet.  Normally I keep a mop up tag so I wont waste any color, but because of how the colors are layered I wasn't sure how well they would look when I cleaned them up with my tag.  However, I almost love the end result on my tags more than I did on my actual attempt! 


Watch for more details and photos about this tag, and a tutorial on how I did the bird using some other fun new products I've only just started playing around with!