Hello friends! I can't believe it is already the first of March. Time to flip another leaf in this year's calendar. I made a photo calendar as a Christmas gifts to family members, and we have three at home (one in my studio, one in Anton's room and one in the kitchen). The kids love to look at the photos and always notice when there is a new one.
Today, I have a Sizzix mixed media tutorial to share with you today, using a range of different mediums: acrylic paint, gesso, matte medium, ink, Grit-Paste and Distress Crayons, and dies of course.
I made a spring-time flowery canvas board, with a grungy brick background. I always enjoy making these types of projects with lots of layers, and canvas boards are also great gifts. The canvas board is 5 x 7 in. You can also use the techniques for art journaling, card making, tags, scrapbooking etc. I used stamps and dies by Tim Holtz.
I did a fun and easy coloring techniques with Distress Crayons for the flowers. Let's start.
Start by stamping flowers from Flower Garden and Mini Bouquet with Jet Black ink on mixed media paper. Apply some white gesso to the flowers. Don't cover them completely, but concentrate, for example, on the larger petals, and the flower centers. Let dry.
Coat the flowers and stems with a layer of Distress Collage Medium Matte. This step gives us a nice surface to continue working on with Distress Crayons, since it is less absorbent than the paper.
When the matte medium is dry, apply Distress Crayons to the flowers. I used at least two shades on each flower.
Smooth the crayon out with your finger. Don't worry about it being perfect.
Use a paper towel with a tiny bit of water on, and wipe off some of the crayon. The texture of both the gesso and the matte medium will start showing. If you wipe off too much, you can just add more color.
Continue until you have colored all the flowers. As you can see, I made more flowers than I needed for the project. I wasn't sure how many flowers I wanted to use when starting out.
Pair the flowers up with the coordinating dies from the Flower Garden & Mini Bouquet set. Die cut them one at a time. It is more likely that a die shifts if you die cut more than one at a time. Use this sandwich: Sizzix Magnetic Platform, Cutting Pad, paper, die facing down, second Cutting Pad.
Die cut all the flowers and stems. I needed to make a couple of additional stems after taking this photo. It's a lot easier to cut these out with the coordinating dies than using scissors.
Coat a canvas with gesso using a palette knife, and press the lid of a Distress Paint bottle into the wet gesso here and there to create circles.
Die cut the brick pattern from Mixed Media 3 set from mixed media paper a couple of times and cut randomly with a pair of scissors. Adhere to the board with Matte Medium. Also tear some old book paper and adhere at the bottom of the board. These will form the base for our soil.
Coat with a thin layer of gesso.
Stamp the background randomly with a script stamp and Jet Black ink. This French Ledger Writing stamp comes from the French Marketplace Paris set. I really like the small script.
Paint the board with Distress Paints. You can water them down a little.
When dry, smear a tiny bit of Walnut Stain Distress Crayon on some of the bricks, and add a shadow to the bricks with a Black Soot marker. The shadow gives a lot of dimension to the piece.
Smear Grit-Paste at the bottom of the panel, to create gritty soil. While painting, I look at the text paper to avoid covering up words I want to keep, such as 'white roses' and 'women'.
When the paste is dry, paint with Pumice Stone and Ground Espresso.
For a final touch, splatter the canvas with gold paint.
Glue the flowers to the canvas with matte medium. Here you can see the texture a little better.
Add some more Grit-Paste at the bottom of the stems, and when dry, paint brown. This makes it look like the flowers are growing in the soil, instead of being glued on top of it.
I die cut a title from both mixed media cardstock and brown cardstock and layered them together, offsetting them slightly to create a shadow. The word comes from the Friendship Words Script set.
The sentiment comes from a stamp by Wendy Vecchi and was cut into strips and inked.
I like the random textured effect of the coloring. The blue flowers were made darker in the centers.
The panel would also look great using only one kind of flowers, but in two sizes.
The bricks, script stamping, gold splatters and shading give a cool grungy look to the background.
Happy crafting!
Anna-Karin
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This looks wonderful Anna-Karin! Especially love how the flowers have co-orinating dies as Im not great at fussy cutting. Fab tutorial - thanks for sharing. Nicola x
ReplyDeleteI love this panel, all the textures add so much dimension to the project. At first glance, I was wishing that I had a brick stencil to create that background for a project I am working on but when I noticed how you created it, I was thrilled to realize that this is something I do own. I really love your project, the dirt that the flowers are growing from is perfect! Thank you for all of the tips!
ReplyDeleteA beautiful canvas Anna-Karin and a great tutorial! x
ReplyDeleteThis is beautiful Anna-Karin, a wonderful job!
ReplyDeleteAwesome made! I love these set of dies and stamp. You made beautiful creation with it.
ReplyDelete