Saturday 28 July 2012

ATC - little beginings

I have entered an ATC swap and, never having made an ATC before, I thought I'd make a couple extra.  The theme for this swap is 'metal' or metal related.  I had some great ideas that followed the theme, but what did I make?

Dream in Colour

Well, they are very vibrant, colourful ATC's with no sign of metal anywhere.  For this fiasco I blame the arrival of my new Dylusions spray inks from Dyan Reaveley.  They are just so bright and bold that I didn't want to stop playing with them.  I love how the colours blend and change as you look at them.  On the Dream in Colour card I used Bubble Gum Pink and Pure Sunshine.  All of the other shades are made by the colours blending together.

Smelly Cat
On this one I used London Blue and Bubble Gum Pink again.  The cat is cut from a bigger stamp and coloured with inktesil pencils.  I did some random stamping with various things and sprayed through a harlequin stencil with water to get the ghosted image.  The letters are tiny individual stamps I filled in using a soufflĂ© pen.
And as for the 'metal' ATCs -  I made 4 in accordance with the theme, and two will be going into the mail today.  I will post photo's later once they have arrived with the recipient.


Friday 20 July 2012

There's something fishy about this...

A couple of weeks ago, Captain Slow and I went to the aquarium where I saw a tank of Piranha fish, that glittered and shone as they swam.  They were the most beautiful colours and  the sparkle on their bodies looked like stardust stickles to me.

Last weekend I decided to do a journal page and test my theory that Piranha fish are made of stickles


You can't really see the sparkle in this photo but each fish has quite a bit of texture, the bodies have star dust stickles and the eyes have a coating of glossy accents to raise them and make them more 'eye' like.

This photo better shows the texture and the fish eye.  The fish were drawn and coloured with Inktensil pencils and then collaged to the page using Golden gel medium.


You can almost see the sparkle in this shot, but I must admit it does look more like Rock Candy distress stickles!

Wednesday 11 July 2012

I'm a little rusty today

I have had so much fun over the past week making myself a pencil box!  A few months ago I found a Bronnley soap box that was the perfect size and started to paint and stamp on it and then lost interest.
About a week ago, I decided it had to change drastically - and it did!
My lovely grungy rusted heavy metal pencil case was born.

I had no idea I was going to enjoy making this so much and didn't take many photo's during the process, but for anyone interested I'll try to document what I did.
For the box, it was a small box originally holding three Bronnley brand soaps.
Metal banding on the top and around the side is cut from Tim Holtz grunge paper
The Euscutcheon is a Tim Holtz grunge board element
The rivets are pearl half domes usually placed in the centre of paper flowers
Painted in a battleship grey colour
The rust is applied by placing glue where you want the rust to appear, sprinkle with Crafty Notions Rust powder and spray with white vinegar.

Above is the empty box after I had painted the outside Grey.  You can see the untreated eustucheon at the top of the photo.

The box is now glued and painted in grey but no rusting is done yet.  Even now it looks heavy and is a shock when you pick it up and find it's just a light box.


More views of the eustucheon as I worked on the rusting process.  Before I applied the rust powder, I covered it completely with Distress Ink in Rust (what else!).  I made sure I covered all of the cut edges to that no grunge board was visible.
This is the eustucheon after the first spray with white vinegar.  I think I sprayed it three times by the time I finished

A close up of the rust, it looks real because it is real.
Once completed I covered everything with a layer or two of clear Golden Mat Medium to seal it.  I applied it with a brush but then stippled it with a cloth to removed brush marks on the rust.  The brush marks are only on the painted surfaces,

It is now full of markers and pens and sitting proudly on my book case.