Happy Accident

I meant to duplicate the "popcorn paper" technique using mat board, but I goofed. It turned out to be one of those happy accidents.





I started by spraying a deep red scrap of mat board with the texture spray described earlier. In the last project I covered the chipboard completely so that no chipboard showed through. This time I sprayed more sparsely and left mat board showing through.



Since the Twinkling H20's floated on the top when the chipboard was completely covered, I thought with some of the mat board showing through I might get a nice sparkly effect. Wrong! The Twinks completely saturated the top layer of the mat board and dried disappointingly flat. For some unknown reason, I started rubbing the surface with my finger while it was still damp. The top layer began to roll up and peel off, revealing the next layer with just a touch of color left. Interesting effect, but the picture is dark, so you have to click on it to look at the larger version to see what I mean.





One look at the resulting surface and I knew it was going to take Radiant Rains very nicely. I used Sky Blue and Periwinkle. (I get mine from After Midnight.) The rough edges resulting from rolling off part of the mat board's surface layer actually gave the piece a marbled effect.

Once I got the color saturation I liked I decided to add a little webbing spray on top.



Here's the finished piece photographed in the sun on an angle, in a desparate attempt to get the shimmer to show up.

If I do this again, I'd change the process in the following ways. First, I'd skip the texture spray altogether because most of it rolled off when I removed so much of the surface layer. Second, I'd probably wet the top layer of the mat board with inexpensive watercolor paint rather than Twinks since none of the glimmer showed up in that early stage. Third, I'd use a different color of webbing spray. White was all I had on hand. I might even try Golden Clear Tar Gel mixed with Luminarte Primary Elements to get the webbing effect.

I love learning from happy accidents.

Back to Gravel

I'm back to working with gravel. I dug into a bag of Cherry Stone Grit I had in the garage (for spreading on the slippery sidewalks during the winter). Here's what it looks like after being rinsed. It's still a little wet in this picture. When it dries, it's not quite as dark.

I was curious to see how this would perform in one of my gravel art pieces. Here's a creation using the grit with a Krafty Lady mold purchased from After Midnight Stamps. It's mold number 128. For the column, I used paper clay painted with Lumiere paint (copper) followed by a blue acrylic paint rub.

For the background, I layed down a base of Radiant Rains on a piece of mat board. Then I mixed some of the grit into Golden Soft Gel and spread it on the mat board with a palette knife. If I do it again, I may mix some acrylic paint into the gel before spreading it. When it was dry I added highlights with Lumiere paint. Finally, I brushed on some additional Radiant Rains mists. You'll probably want to click on the picture below to see a bigger version.

It looks really different than the aquarium gravel pieces. The cherry stone grit is sharper and more angular. I like the look.

Aquarium Gravel Texture Art

After covering up the Garnet Gel in my last project, I decided to try to a similar texture with cheaper materials. I went to the pet store and got a bag of the smallest aquarium gravel I could find. Here's what I did.

Start with a piece of mat board. Apply a thick layer of white glue in a pattern of your choosing. Sprinkle fine acquariam gravel over the glue and gently push down on it to set it in the glue. After it dries, apply a thin coat of Golden Self Leveling Gel (or any white glue if you don't have gel) to set the gravel further and keep it from dropping out of the glue layer. To give the areas without any gravel some texture, apply a layer of Golden Soft Gel (Matte) with your fingers, like finger painting. Click on the picture below to see the texture created by the Soft Gel.

Paint it, rocks and all, with black acrylic paint. (I didn't paint the hot pink rocks before adding Opals and wished I had.)

Paint glue on places that you want to put Opals. Sprinkle Opals on the wet glue and heat with heat gun until Opals melt. Add pinches of other Opal colors. Spray black areas with interference Radiant Rains.

Unfortunately, these pictures don't begin to pick up the richness of the interference colors. Here are some closeups of the final project. Click on the pictures to see the detail.

Bleached Flowers

I got two great flower stamps designed by Zeborah Loray for After Midnight at the St. Paul Expo and decided to try them out today using a bleach painting technique. The first one is just stamped, embossed and bleached. The second one is stamped, embossed, bleached and colored with chalks using a water barrel brush.

I went back then and glazed the flowers. I glazed one leaf of the chalked flower with Diamond Glaze from the bottle and realized I didn't like how thick it was looking for such a large application. Plus, it had bubbles in it. So I switched to Golden Self Leveling Gel and brushed it on the rest. I like that much better. I've never tried to brush on Diamond Glaze. Maybe that would have worked. You can see the difference if you look at the larger version of the picture.



I used a sheet of black cardstock from The Paper Company Black & White Value Pack. Got it on sale at Michaels.

I use bleach straight from the bottle. I gave up on a gel bleach pen. I couldn't get results with it. To keep the bleach from bleeding outside the lines, I heat emboss the image in the color of the paper I'm using.

I haven't done that for a long time. Sometimes it's nice to go back to the simple techniques.