Fantasy Castle

This is one of my favourite pictures that I have created recently. This started out life as a piece of white canvas board, slightly bigger than A4 in size. I dripped various colours of wax all over the place, starting with white in the centre and moving through various shades of blue. This was heated with a hot air gun (the type you use for DIY rather than the craft one used for melting embossing powder) until the wax started to run. A combination of moving the heat gun and the board itself allowed the wax to be moved where I wanted it to go. Once the base pattern had been created to give a very turbulent effect, the castle was added using the edge of an encaustic iron.

Secrets and Dreams Picture

Good morning one and all.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week but I have been in Slovakia for work. I don't know, how dare work get in the way of crafting! Consequently I have a few Challenges to catch up with.

This project is for Die Cut Dreams Challenge #75 - Anything but a card. So here is one of my canvas board pictures. It is A6 in size.

The white board was painted with acrylic paints in yellows and browns, lightened in places with a bit of white.

For the background, I took a piece of calico fabric, coloured it with patches of Stazon ink, just by pressing the ink pad to the fabric to give random rectangles of colour. This was then stamped with some texture stamps from Elusive images in pumpkin, mustard and brown, layering them up but stamping one image over another. The final layer was made by stamping the key hole and sentiments onto tissue paper in brown. When dry, these were applied over the top using watered down PVA glue. The slight wrinkles giving texture and character. When dry a coat of the PVA was applied over the whole sheet and allowed to dry. This gave a fairly stiff piece of fabric. Note: Stazon ink had to be used for all of this work or else the PVA glue would have made Distress or other dye based inks smudge and run.

For the embellishment, I took another piece of fabric, coloured it with Adirondack ink and stamped the keyhole (again from EI) in a dark brown. No liquid was going near this piece so it did not matter that dye based ink was used. This was cut from the fabric sheet and edged with blanket stitch, in a rusty coloured cotton, to stop it fraying.

The background sheet was trimmed to size with a metal edged rule and knife. No fraying here because of the amount of glue used on it! This was then bonded in place with more PVA glue and allowed to dry. The embellishment was mounted on top with double sided tape and the small pearls and crystals added to complete the effect.

A ribbon was adhered to the back to hang the picture and the back was covered with brown card to tidy everything up!

Challenge link: http://diecutdreams.blogspot.com/2010/11/challenge-75-anything-but-card-no-cards.html

Seahorse

Seahorses, aren't they amazing. Well, here is one from an Elusive Images stamp (as is the seaweed and shell combo). The board is 7" x 5" so you can see that these are sizeable stamps. This is a fairly simple picture having been painted with various shades of blue and green with the stamped images applied on top once the background was dry. I keep thinking that it needs some embellishment but I do not have anything suitable at present so rather than rush it and do something I will regret, I will wait until the right things come along. What do you think? All comments gratefully received.

Butterfly

Another canvas board project, The colours on this are more vivid in real life but you will get the idea. A heavy layer of gesso was applied to the board and this was textured, using a palette knife, to give a ripple effect down one side. After several days drying time, a piece of very coarse jute woven strip was added down the other side and that took some sticking I can tell you. However, I succeeded in the end without it fraying or sticking up too much. Pastel green acrylic paint was used to cover the whole surface. The small butterflies were stamped onto tissue paper and coloured in with Twinkling H2Os. These were torn from the sheet and applied to the rippled surface, ensuring that they conformed to the surface rather then bridging across the ripples, using a matte gel (being very careful not to disturb the H2Os). The absolutely huge butterfly was stamped onto silk card, cut out and coloured with Promarkers. All of the butterfly stamps were designed by Elusive Images. It was then an assembly job to layer up the fabric flowers with silicone glue and add some stones to the centre to give a flash of bling and mount the butterfly in place with more silicone glue and add some wire antennae as a finishing touch.

Another canvas board project

Well, here we are, Monday again. That's it. No crafting for me today. Off to work I go. Still, I thought I would steal time to up-load another project. This is very similar to the previous one with the background being painted at the same time. Whilst the stamps are different, they are still by Elusive Images. No foiling this time but I have used the seed beads again as they give a nice bit of texture and shine.

The crafting I like

Paper crafting is the basis of my crafting likes. I am also getting into Mixed Media projects. I love rubber stamping and find that more and more I am erring towards two stamp manufacturers - Elusive Images and Clarity Stamps. They may not be the cheapest but to me they are the best. Here is an example of one of my projects. This is on canvas board with acrylic paint for the background, Elusive Images stamps for the trees and sentiment and then it is set off with gold foiling and seed beads.