Mixed Media - Clock & Butterfly

This is a present for my friend's daughter, based on the mixed media piece of wall art I did a little while ago, here.

I didn't take step by step photos, as I was quite anxious to get it finished in time, but the basic procedure is as follows.....

• Cut some greyboard to fit the chosen frame - I knew that I would be using a mount to allow room for the crystals, so I cut the board to 10 x 8", and marked out the visible area of 8 x 6".  Cover both sides with gesso - the back won't be seen, of course, but it does seem to stop the piece warping if both sides are primed.
• Die-cut your chosen shapes in white card.
• Gather the 'background' items together - masks and stamps.
• Work out placement of die-cuts, then stamp/emboss where required.  I used brown embossing powder as I wasn't sure how it would take everything that was going over it - if it acted as a resist, brown would look OK (though I did end up putting Treasure Gold over it anyway!).
• Adhere die cuts.
• Use texture paste through the masks in required areas.  Leave to dry.
• Cover everything with gesso, leave to dry.  I did speed this up with a heat gun!
• Apply colours  .... I have used mists and alcohol inks, using water from a mister to help everything flow around the piece nicely.  Dry thoroughly with a heat gun between each colour so the colours don't muddy together.
• When happy with the result, make sure everything is completely dry and apply Treasure Gold to various raised areas.  I have used Classic Gold on the clock dial, the embossed script and a little over the texture squares  in the corners, Onyxite on the die-cut corners, the clock hands and the butterfly.  The gears and clock centres have the misleadingly-named Sapphire, it is not really blue, much more of a teal!
• Place crystals here and there :-)
• Leave for at least a couple of hours to let the solvents from the TG evaporate off before placing behind the glass in the frame.

I took the photo without the glass, to avoid reflections.  My friend is very happy with it and will let me know if her daughter likes it ...... fingers crossed :-)

Mixed media wall art

I have at times messed around with texture paste, sprays and alcohol inks, but I don't think I have ever intentionally started a full on mixed media piece before.  I had to go and buy some gesso especially :-)  This was inspired by two projects found whilst blog surfing. 
This one from Misteejay:
http://misteejay.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sunshine-good-company.html

And this one from Gabrielle Pollacco, which I found via a video link on you tube:
http://gabriellepollacco.blogspot.ca/2014/01/video-tutorial-steampunk-journal-cover.html
the video is well worth watching, not too bad at a shade over 24 minutes, though I did mute the music after a while :-)

So I started with a piece of greyboard cut to fit a 5 x 7 frame, applied gesso all over it, left to dry.  Then I added texture paste through stencils and adhered various die-cuts and some letter stickers, and gesso'ed all over again.  At which point it looked like this:

 



Now for colour..... I used spray mists and alcohol inks and water from a mister to make the colours run nicely.  The piece was dried with a heat gun between each colour.  Then I applied Treasure Gold in Classic Gold over the raised die-cuts and some TG in Aquamarine in a few areas.

The frame was a plain wooden one, I painted it with Paperartsy fresco paint in chocolate pudding, then added some copper spray mist over the top, but this made it compete with the artwork too much, so I knocked it down a bit with some Paperartsy matte glaze.  The final touch was to add some metal corners, from 7 Gypsies I think, coloured with alcohol ink.  I also added a few crystals to the gears in the piece.

And there it was done!  I am rather pleased with it and will definitely do some others.  After all, I have a whole tub of gesso to use up ...... :-)