More Faux Leathers

THE BIG REVEAL, PART 8.

This is the second of two posts today.

Many of my regular visitors have been justifiably very frustrated and impatient with me lately because I’ve been working hard on several secret projects that I wasn’t at liberty to reveal until now. With her permission, I can now reveal that I have been making stuff for Shaz. As many of you will know, she is about to undergo major surgery and has been through so much over the past year. She and her lovely hubby share the same birthday and I have made cards for them both, a get well card for her (still under wraps) and a selection of bits and pieces for her to play with once she feels up to being creative again. She opened the parcel on her birthday (14th Aug.) and now that she has received them I can share the making of them with you. Until now, I didn’t want to spoil her surprise as she visits my blog regularly. Throughout my own cancer journey, this wonderful friend has been such an encouragement and support to me, and this is one way I can thank her, and show my own appreciation and support. I know that she would love a visit from you to wish her well for her surgery on 2nd Sept.

I shall be uploading a couple of posts each day over the next few days until all is revealed. Please scroll down for earlier posts.

More Faux Leathers

I have made three more sheets of faux leather, this time A4 size, as mini-masterboards, and decided to try doing some different colours. One was the classic brown that I’ve done before, but this time I didn’t use the yellow ochre, and the other two were green and red respectively.

Here are the materials for the green one.

I chose Hooker’s green for the main colour, as it is a nice rich dark green, and sap green for the dry brushing.

For the red one, I didn’t really have the colour I wanted, so I got out the various shades of red that I do have, and also some black in case it needed darkening.

Here are the sheets after their first coat, drying, each with their respective paints.

As before, the brown one’s main colour is burnt umber. For the green one: Hooker’s green. For the red one, I used the whole small tube of crimson red from a very cheap and nasty little set of acrylic paints that I started off with – I’ve had them for ages and can’t remember where they came from – when I squeezed it out onto the palette it was like water, and then at last some more solid paint came out! I mixed it all up well and it took the whole tube to cover the sheet. The colour is more or less OK, though, and it will all get covered with subsequent layers. This red one was more experimental than the others because of not having the exact colours I wanted.

Here are the faux leathers with their respective paints, after all the painting was complete. With the brown one, I decided to leave it plain after the dry brushing with the burnt sienna, and not add the yellow ochre which gives it a slight tan tinge, and I did not add any gilding wax.

The green one looked very rich with a light touch of Treasure Gold gilding wax in the raised creases. As someone said, to get the right effect, you need to touch the surface as if it’s red hot when applying the gilding wax, and this is good advice because that way it prevents you from being too heavy-handed and getting the gold anywhere but on the raised surface.

As predicted, the red one proved more difficult to get right. I added a dry-brushed layer of alizarin crimson, and then cadmium red, but the whole thing still didn’t look quite right, so I made a dark wash with black and alizarin crimson, which I brushed liberally over the surface and let it run into the creases. I repeated this with more black in the mix until I got the right look. I was concerned that all that water would make the card disintegrate so I was careful not to handle it until I’d dried it with my heat gun. The result was pretty fair at the end! It had a lot of layers of paint, dry brushing and washes before I was satisfied, and again it was given a lovely rich look by the application of some Treasure Gold gilding wax. The red one also proved the most difficult to photograph to get the colour accurate – in this photo it looks a bit brown.

Once all the leathers were painted, gilded and fully dry, I was able to apply the acrylic wax. After much experimentation, this is my preferred finish for faux leather. It gives a gorgeous rich, shiny, polished surface once it is dry and buffed with a soft cloth, like the patina of old leather. It goes on quite milky, but dries clear and shiny. Fabulous stuff! I have seen it applied to stitched teabags and they look like old leather!

Here are the finished leathers with their application of buffed acrylic wax.

Unfortunately in these photos, the gilding no longer shows up! It is still there, though, and they look sumptuous and rich. You can see a little of it in this detailed shot of the three leathers.

This is such a fun technique to do! I recommend it to everyone. You can use it for the backgrounds for cards (it is especially useful for those perpetually tricky male cards we are all called upon to make from time to time!); book covers, to cover boxes, for scrap book pages, etc. etc. You are only limited by your imagination.

Suggestions on a postcard, please, on how to make this stuff actually smell like leather!!

WOYWW 320

My desk today has on it the remains of the project I completed yesterday – a faux leather masterboard.

As usual, I haven’t put stuff away after I finished, but then, if I had, all you’d see would be a bare desk. I don’t know why, but I’ve often just finished something when it’s time for WOYWW!

You can see the masterboard on the craft mat. Here’s a better picture of it.

I’ve got a bit of a deadline on to make several projects, none of which I can show you until the recipients have received them, but the faux leather is definitely going to be used for one of them. At the end of last week, I did a mixed media project which I also can’t show you… I haven’t even got a sneak peak of that!

Resting on top of the masterboard on my desk is a plastic box with some acrylic paints in it. I mentioned to my hubby last night that I’d used up practically a whole tube of burnt umber, painting 2 A3 sheets for faux leather with 3 coats of paint, and I’d have to order some more, and he said he had some acrylics somewhere which he didn’t want. Someone gave them to him but he does watercolours. He dug them out and there’s a nice lot of burnt umber, as well as some other colours, but I still need to order some more paints.

You can also see the three tubes of acrylics on the left of the masterboard, that I used to paint it. Further to the left (mostly out of shot, you will be glad to hear) is the same untidy pile of stuff waiting to be put away! I hate putting things away. It’s a very boring task. Eventually I can’t stand the mess any more and then I get down to it.

Still not put away are the distress inks I used for my last project (which is still secret). Beside those are the gel medium and acrylic wax (also not yet put away!) used to finish my two faux leather masterboards. You can also see the piece of kitchen paper I used to clean up the brown acrylic paint I used. I keep these pieces of kitchen paper and use different ones for cleaning up different colours and eventually when they are nicely covered, they can be used for creating backgrounds, or reconstituted into “hand made paper.” Just as I hate putting things away, I also hate throwing things away!

That just about covers my desk for this week, I think.

I am determined to crack on with my projects and get as much done as possible before Friday when I have my fourth chemo treatment. I am not sure how I am going to feel afterwards, and with deadlines firmly in place, I am not at all sure I shall finish my projects! Hopefully the effects will last only for the first week, like last time – I can cope with that. After this treatment I will be half way through! What a great milestone that is – after that I shall be making rapid progress towards the end, which should take place in mid-October.

After showering, hair-washing, tidying my bathroom (I’ve finally put away all the bags of samples we picked up from the stoma open day back in June – I have now tried them all and done a review on my Gutless Bag Lady blog), making the bed with clean sheets, sorting the washing, taking my WOYWW photo and also dealing with a bag leak and a major stoma fountain in the bathroom first thing (sorry if that’s TMI but it was fairly dramatic!!! Kermit, my stoma, who is usually very well behaved, decided he was fed up with being a goodie 2-shoes and showed another side to his character!) – I am now exhausted and on the recliner. Hopefully I’ll feel a bit better later and will be able to crack on with my latest project.

Have a great WOYWW everybody with lots of creative juices flowing, and I look forward to seeing what you are all up to.

Faux Leather Masterboard Part 2

When the two sheets of faux leather were dry, I was able to start painting them.

You only need a fairly limited colour palette – a darker and a lighter brown are all that are required, but when I did this the first time, I felt that the addition of a little yellow ochre lightened it a bit and gave it a little more interest.

I worked on my non-stick craft mat as this is so easy to clean up, even when the acrylic paint has dried on it. Starting to paint the first layer of burnt umber, I used quite a large brush and added a touch of water. It is best to use a combination of stippling and short, multi-directional brush strokes in order to push the paint into all the creases in the faux leather. I went fairly carefully with the first coat, as I did not want to break up the surface of the paper, which although much stronger now it was dry, was still vulnerable if wet.

The first coat of burnt umber complete. You can see that the cover is inadequate, and some of the whiteness of the card is showing through the paint layer.

At least two coats are required, depending on the coverage and the quality of the paint; I think three coats is best. Here is the faux leather after the application of the second coat. You can see that the coverage is a lot more even now.

The third and final coat complete. It now has a good, overall coverage in a rich, dark brown.

It could have been left like this – it now had the look of leather, but the finish was a little flat, and with some highlights it would appear much more like the real thing. You can see that the paint leaves a slight sheen – in the above photo the paint is still a bit wet, and it dries slightly less shiny.

To finish the piece, some lighter brown (in this case, burnt sienna) and then some yellow ochre, were dry-brushed on. The minimum of paint was applied; it is much easier to add more than to remove too much! It requires a very light touch, just enough for the paint to touch the tops of the creases.

The burnt sienna being applied.

The piece with the burnt sienna dry brushing laid over the original piece to compare. Unfortunately the photos don’t really pick up the difference very well.

The burnt sienna dry brushing complete. I think you can see that it now has a reddish tinge.

Dry brushing with yellow ochre. Again, the piece being worked on is laid on top of the piece with just the burnt sienna dry brushing, to compare.

Once both sheets were dry, I applied the finishes. I decided that with the piece I was going to retain as a photographic background, it would be better if it had a matte finish so that I wouldn’t be troubled by reflections. This is where I made my mistake. I thought that if I painted on some soft matte gel medium with a foam brush, this would dry crystal clear (as the glass bead gel medium does) and that I would just get a nice matte finish, but the wretched stuff dried quite milky, and it’s not a success! You live and learn… I would have done better to use a matte spray varnish.

For the other piece, which is going to be used as a masterboard and cut up for different projects, I used one single liberal coat of acrylic wax, again applied with a foam brush. I have had success with this before on faux leather.

It has a lovely sheen, and brings out the colours and texture well.

Here are the two finishes compared. I may still be able to use the matte one but it hasn’t come out as intended! I am very pleased with the other one, though.

The pieces are quite floppy and flexible and have the feel of real leather.

The finished masterboard.

I have deliberately left this masterboard unembellished. When cut up, I can emboss the pieces if I want, or add some gold highlights with gilding wax, or whatever else is required for the individual project. Leaving it in its original state makes it more versatile.

Faux leather can be used for cards, covering boxes, making book covers… its uses are endless, and limited only by your own imagination. The colour can be anything you like, and if the surface is further plasticised with the addition of wax or varnish to seal it, it is actually quite durable. It is very useful for making man cards as it has a nice masculine look! Watch this space to see what I do with my faux leather masterboard.

Recycled Mini-Album–Finished at Last!

Saturday was the first anniversary of my father’s death. It seems appropriate that I completed the album that celebrates his life on that very day.

I have two photos to end the book. The first is of my dad with his newborn granddaughter, who will be the recipient of this book. The other is the very last photo that was ever taken of him, on his 90th birthday at the residential home. They put a candle on his pudding, and you can see how happy he looks. I am so glad that despite his confusion with the dementia at the end of his life, he spent his last days content and at peace, in a beautiful care home, with his family visiting when we could.

Here is the page spread with the background and borders. To create the background I stamped with a Stamp Barn swirl stamp (FLR 0211), using Versamark, and then brushing on randomly three different Perfect Pearls, in Turquoise, Forever Green and Forever Violet. You can see the semi-circular hole for the tag on the left.

The page complete. You can see the tag in place on the left, with its tag puller with the embossed flower. The reverse of this tag is the clocks tag on the previous page.

The last few pages of the book are taken up with details of its construction and embellishment, and some blank pages for my niece to add her own reminiscences and photos.

After completing the second page, I realised I’d left out several of the materials, for instance alcohol inks and inked kitchen paper. Ah well. No room for any more!

For the final “Notes” pages I cut sheets of plain white paper to shape, and distressed the edges with Black Soot distress ink, and stuck them down onto each page using soft matt gel medium. I was careful to apply this only to the back of the sheets and the surface of the actual page, and around the edges of the top surface of the sheets only, and not over the whole top surface, so that there would be a plain paper surface for my niece to write on with any pen or pencil of her choice.

The next step was to work on the borders, and I created a different one for each of the three pages, using white acrylic paint, and tidying up the edges with a waterproof black pen once the paint was dry.

The final step was to add the little cartoon that one of my dad’s medical student friends drew of him – I also used this picture in his funeral service sheet. My sister has the original.

I stuck the picture down onto the end paper at the back of the book and added some embellishment with a sepia archival pen, along with my blog address at the bottom of the page.

The end of the book! A good brush up to get rid of any traces of gel medium that had got embedded in the binding, and a final coat of acrylic wax, well buffed up, to give a nice vintage leather effect. I am particularly pleased that despite getting a bit carried away with lots of texture which added a huge amount of thickness to many of the pages, when closed, the book covers are exactly parallel – just as they should be!

Just a reminder of what the front looks like.

This has been an amazing project to work on. Every page was full of special memories of me, and I am sure that getting them all down on paper has helped my grieving process in the year following my wonderful dad’s death. Also, I have been thinking constantly about my niece who is to receive the book, and hoping that it will be a real treasure for her to keep for her lifetime, a little memorial of her grandfather. This has truly been a labour of love. Finally, it has been an adventure and exploration into the world of mixed media, and throughout, I have been learning new techniques, and stretching my skills and thinking outside the box, using all kinds of different materials. This adventure has been so much fun!

The final step will be to make a video slideshow of all the photos I took on Saturday night, of each completed page, with perhaps the addition of some work-in-progress pages. I want to keep as comprehensive a record as possible for my own benefit, as I shall feel another bereavement once this book goes to my niece – it has been such an important part of my life for the last eight months!

Before starting this book, I was working on a larger album about Dad, for my hubby and me to keep, based on the “Tattered Time” paper stack from DCWV, which had to be set aside in favour of this album. This is another project to be taken up again in the New Year and worked on as time permits – no deadline on this, and it will be fun to work on.

I hope you have enjoyed the journey.