Mixed Media Anniversary Card

Today is our 31st wedding anniversary. Goodness, is it really that long? What a lot has happened since we got married!

Last night, still catching up with myself after my busy week last week, and then having to rest a lot, I finally sat down in my studio and got a card made for my lovely hubby. I originally planned on making something quite simple because of time, but while I was resting, I came across Marta Lapkowska, a brilliant Polish mixed media artist, on Youtube, and some of her fabulous video tutorials on creating texture from anything you could think of – an absolute gift to a complete texture junkie like Yours Truly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAOJwdQqokQ and this inspired me to do something a little more challenging.

What fun I had!

Here’s what I did, step by step.

First of all, I selected one of my sheets of watercolour paper with stains on it from drying teabags, and tore one out.

In my stash I’ve got quite a few sheets of hand-made paper which I think were originally part of some wedding service sheets that I collected up after a wedding service once. I knew they’d come in useful for art – they are gorgeously soft and textured. Again, I tore out a piece, to give a nice uneven edge, and I was delighted to find that the tearing gave almost the same edge as the natural deckle edge of the hand-made paper.

Next came the teabags. I selected a few from my stash.

I cut them open and put some of the tea on my palette. The rest was thrown away. I should really have a blitz and empty all my stash of teabags (I’ve got hundreds!) and save the tea to put on the garden! Also, the teabags would take up a lot less room without the tea in them. One day, one day…

I mixed the tea with some Polyfilla One Fill, my preferred (cheap) texture paste. It was pretty dry so I added some water.

I opened up the teabags by tearing them, and saved the cut off strips which were interestingly textured.

I applied a few of the teabags to the bottom half of the hand-made paper piece, using soft matte gel medium.

I then applied the tea/Polyfilla mixture in places, to add texture, being careful not to obscure the more interesting part of the teabag layer. I wished I had screwed the teabags up more, instead of laying them down flat, as I would have got more interesting texture that way.

After drying this, I thought it needed a bit more texture added, so out came the coarse pumice gel medium – I love this oh-so-gritty stuff!

Using soft matte gel medium, I stuck down the teabag stain piece to the top of the hand-made paper, and also added a bit of this gel medium over the textured part, to make sure that it didn’t flake off.

Time for stamping. I am soooo glad I bought my wonderful Tonic Stamp Platform! I’ve never been very good at stamping and this tool makes it so easy. Also, I was able to do several test pieces (e.g. on the left of the picture) to experiment with the layout of the grasses stamps – this set is from Inkylicious, and is “Create a Collage – Meadow.” I did the stamping in several stages so that I could get the layout I wanted, using sepia archival ink.

I stamped so that the stems of the grasses extended below the bottom of the teabag stain piece, and extended them, and filled any gaps, with my fine sepia marker.

Here’s a detail shot of the stamping.

Painting with tea and coffee! I made up some strong tea and coffee for this.

Painting with the tea. I used a wide fan brush for this and dabbed it on more or less all over the background piece.

Using a finer brush, I painted the coffee around the edges and to emphasise some of the texture a bit more. I had to do this several times, drying in between with my heat gun – I don’t think I made the coffee quite strong enough.

At this stage I also painted a bit of tea over the teabag stain behind the grasses to emphasise it, as this was getting a bit lost in the design.

I thought the background needed a bit of colour variation, so I used some Infusions. To the bottom left I added some Lemoncello from set 1, and to the right, some Rusty Car from set 2, and these certainly added a bit of richness and depth.

I felt a distinct need to add a bit of complimentary colour to all this brownness, so I dug out my Crushed Grape Dylusions spray ink and spattered some of that on, and I think it improved it a lot.

The edges needed darkening, so I did this with some black acrylic paint. I also added some of this around the texture to emphasise it more.

I thought the whole thing needed lightening a bit, so I masked off the teabag stain piece at the top, and spattered the rest with white acrylic paint.

This was the result.

Originally I wasn’t going to put a sentiment on the outside of the card, but there needed to be something to balance the design, so I decided to add one. I went through my pile of rejects and spares from my Infusions mini-album project and found this one that exactly complemented my design. I tore off the bottom and wrote the text using my Uniball white Signo marker pen, and then darkened the edges, especially along the white torn top edge, with tea. I stuck this to the front of the card with regular matte gel medium, dabbing carefully over the text to prevent the water-soluble white from smudging, and afterwards touching this up where necessary.

To create the card base, I cut a piece of heavy white card and softened the edges with some more tea.

Inside, again using my wonderful stamp platform, I stamped the sentiment with sepia archival ink, using the “Memorable Moments” stamp set from Stampin’ Up.

To add a bit of interest, I made a couple of wide brush strokes across this sentiment with tea, using the fan brush.

I assembled the card using Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive which is a really good strong wet glue.

The finished card.

My hubby loves it!

Here it is, side by side with the other card I made recently, for his birthday last week.