Dylusions Mixed Media Get Well Card

THE BIG REVEAL, PART 9.

This is the final thing that I made for Shaz before she went into hospital – until I had heard from her hubby that she had received it, it had to remain under wraps! I now know that I can share it with you.

I made her a get well card using a combination of Dylusions sprays and my new Dylusions paints. The colours of the two types of media match beautifully.

I began with a scrap piece of card which I had used for mopping up Peacock Feathers distress ink and Vibrant Turquoise Dylusions spray. It ended up pretty crinkled and distorted but I thought it would flatten out OK.

This is my honeycomb stencil laid over the top of the background piece.

Stencilling with Polyfilla One Fill (what our US cousins call joint compound) – a lot cheaper than artists’ moulding paste! I spread a little in random patches, using a palette knife, and scraped off any bits that looked messy, and then dried it with my heat gun.

The piece with the stencilled Polyfilla.

Lemon Zest Dylusions spray. A couple of quick bursts at the top, then spritzed with water and held up so it dripped down through the stencilling. Love the lime green it produces with the turquoise.

Repeating the process with Crushed Grape Dylusions spray. In each case I spritzed it with water to help it blend.

Coarse sea salt added, and re-spritzed with water. I left this for a few minutes to react, and then dried it with my heat gun.

The piece with the salt crystals removed. It creates gorgeous swirls and spots as the salt draws the wet ink towards itself.

The piece along with a couple of other pieces used to mop up inks from my craft mat. Fabulous backgrounds!

The addition of Treasure Gold gilding wax to the raised stencilled areas. I put on the barest minimum so that the colours would still show through.

Working on the base card, I began by coating it with a thin layer of gesso, using a foam brush, and then dried with my heat gun. The surface of the card is fairly absorbent, and the gesso prevents the paints sinking in, and helps them blend better.

The Dylusions paints, in Lemon Zest, Vibrant Turquoise and Crushed Grape. I used the Ranger mini-blending tools to apply them and blend them together, and after the first coat was dry, I applied another, and after each one, blended the colours using a baby wipe.

The finished base card. The colours do blend well together, creating new colours.

The stencilled piece stuck down onto the base card.

I found this amusing quote online and printed it out on the computer, cut out the pieces and coloured them with Antique Linen distress stain because the white card I printed them on looked a bit stark. I stuck them down with Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive and outlined each one with rough lines with a gold gel pen. (After I had stuck them down I realised I should have used gel medium… dratted chemo brain!)

The inside of the card was inked with a selection of distress inks, using Inkylicious Ink Dusters, to echo the colours on the front of the card. Starting at the top left corner and working around clockwise, Seedless Preserves, Peacock Feathers, Peeled Paint and Squeezed Lemonade, Spiced Marmalade and Aged Mahogany. The centre of the card still looked rather white and stark, so I added some Antique Linen distress ink to tone it down.

I unscrewed the lid of my water spritzing bottle and flicked the tube over the surface of the card to spatter it with water droplets. I left it to soak in for a few minutes and then blotted it off with kitchen paper to leave the white spots, to create a bit of texture.

The final step was to add the sentiment, which was printed from the computer, coloured with Antique Linen distress stain, stuck down and outlined as before.

The backs of my cards usually seem to get a bit messy (I’m sure other people manage to keep the backs of theirs nice and pristine and clean, but I’ve never worked out how to do this!) and we are told that if you make a mistake, make a feature of it, so I did!

I inked the envelope to echo the colours of the card and its inside, and added the water spattering for a bit of texture.

I hope this card cheers her up in hospital, and at least raises a smile, if not a laugh! She loves very loud heavy rock music and I was delighted when I found that quote on Pinterest, and knew I had to use it for this card!!

Many of us on WOYWW have been following Shaz’s amazing progress in hospital as her hubby writes a daily diary on his blog. We continue to wish her well, and so look forward to the time when she is well enough to join us again. Meantime, take care, Shaz, and get well soon! We miss you.

Red and Gold Dylusions Background

THE BIG REVEAL, PART 4.

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.

Red and Gold Dylusions Background

This is the first of several A4 backgrounds/small masterboards I made for her, along with some other bits and pieces I’ve sent her to cheer her up. To make it, I painted a piece of white card with white gesso, using a foam brush, and I then used my new Dylusions paints which I applied with the round blending tools. I used the corner-corner-side method of creating backgrounds – two adjacent corners and the opposite sides are painted/coloured to begin with, and this sets the pattern for adding more colours.

I began by using the yellow paint (Lemon Zest).

Next came orange (Squeezed Orange) putting the colour on the other two corners and the opposite side.

Next came red (Postbox Red) which went mostly over the orange.

The final colour in this palette was pink (Bubblegum Pink) which covered most of the gaps.

More red to come, covering any remaining gaps and blending with the other colours.

Using a damp piece of kitchen paper, I added tiny amounts of yellow, blending them in well.

Some more Bubblegum Pink followed, also blended with damp kitchen paper. You can use a baby wipe for this technique, too.

More yellow, blended with the same method.

I chose some stencils to use. The small one with all the circles is not a stencil at all, but a stoma measuring gauge!! (I know this will amuse Shaz!) I have got quite a few of these and I thought they’d make good stencils, having circles of varying sizes. They are not terribly durable but I propose using them till they eventually fall apart. After doing this, I found my one measuring gauge made from acetate, and this has now migrated from the bathroom to my ARTHaven! It should last indefinitely and has the bonus of being transparent. (Now that Kermit, my stoma, has settled down to his final size, I no longer need these gauges). The other stencils I selected to use are my own Increasing Circles stencil, and the Tim Holtz stencil “Splatters.” In the end I didn’t use my Increasing Circles one.

Adding some yellow paint through a large circle on the stoma gauge.

More yellow circles. I love how this paint has some translucency to the layer beneath with only one coat.

Adding some pink circles.

I forgot to photograph using the Tim Holtz stencil, but I used orange paint for these circles.

Doodling with a variety of drawing pens.

Finally I added some gold heat embossing, using my embossing pen, and a touch of white gel pen. I added some shadow using a soluble graphite pen and a wet paintbrush.

The final result didn’t come out quite how I intended but I’m reasonably pleased with it! It actually looks a bit like gold bangles (and not, I hope, like stomas!!).

Friendly Plastic Wings

A few days ago I made some more of the pairs of wings with a heart from the mould I made from the metal embellishment I got from Ebay. Nice steampunk look! The first one I made had only one, or possibly two, coats of the Dylusions paint on the heart, and this paint is very fluid and I realised it needed further coats.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been adding another coat of paint each time I was passing – they now have 3 coats and are well covered and nice and red, and a final coat of acrylic gloss varnish just on the hearts, and they are looking much better.

The wings actually look more gold than this in real life – it’s strange how poor the camera is in picking up shiny or glittery surfaces. I am pleased with how the hearts have turned out. The wings were just coloured with gold gilding wax (Treasure Gold) over black gesso.

I finished them off by giving the backs a final touching-up coat of black gesso to cover up any bits of red or gold that had crept round the back, and they look nice and neat now.

Here’s the first one I made, with the angel wings from the moulds I made from the very thin metal ones I have.

You can see that the red heart looks a bit duller. It is much improved with more paint and a coat of shiny varnish.

This is a very nice embellishment and I’m glad I made the mould because I can now make as many as I want, and another advantage is that they are a fraction of the weight of the original, which is solid brass.

These were all photographed on my second sheet of A3 faux leather which I kept for photographic backgrounds. Although I made a mistake and painted it with gel medium to give it a semi-gloss finish and it came out rather milky, this doesn’t seem to show too much on the photos so I can still use it. The other faux leather sheet is being used as a masterboard and is being cut up for other projects and already it is quite diminished in size!

The Big Reveal of my mystery projects is just around the corner! Not long to wait now, if you can contain your impatience for a few more days! I’ve been working hard at them and I am well on top of them.

Less than a week to my next chemo – this 3 weeks is flying by at an alarming rate, but at least the time is going quickly and it will soon be October when my chemo comes to an end, and will hopefully signal a fresh start, and a cancer-free life. Spare a thought for all those who do not have such a positive outcome to look forward to on their cancer journey. I count my blessings daily.

Cookies

Is anybody else getting as profoundly irritated as I am with the recent change regarding cookies? Every blog and website that one visits has the cookie warning which obscures the top of the page and you have to click on it to get rid of it – and it appears again if you visit another page on the same blog. I am getting so fed up with this!!! I wish there was a way to click once on some sort of blanket agreement that you accept the use of cookies so that you don’t have to keep doing it again and again and again ad nauseam… it’s driving me NUTS.

Friendly Plastic Embellishments with Gilding Wax

The final step in completing my Friendly Plastic angel wings and steampunk gearwheel embellishments that I made yesterday was to give them a metallic look.

The first step was to paint them with black gesso. I did this front and back, making sure I got well between the teeth of the various gearwheels.

Once they were dry, I applied three colours of gilding wax randomly to the gearwheels: gold, silver and copper, blending them to give an overall metallic effect that was slightly tarnished-looking.

Unfortunately the photo doesn’t really show up the differences in the colour. For the two pairs of angel wings and the heart and wing embellishment, I confined myself to gold gilding wax.

I painted the heart red, using the Dylusions paint in Postbox Red.

The three pairs of wings.

I am extremely pleased with how these turned out, and I shall definitely be making some more.

I have some silk clay on order to experiment with, too, and I am also going to re-try the UTEE method with the addition of some laser acetate sheet to strengthen them.

WOYWW 317

Here is my workdesk for today. Yesterday was the first time I’d been near it to do anything creative for a while, because the aftermath of my 2nd chemo treatment have been horrendous and I’ve been feeling pooped for nearly 3 weeks! Just starting to feel a bit better in time for the next one, which I hope isn’t going to pole-axe me quite as badly. I go in on Thursday for bloods to be taken, and for my appointment with the oncologist, when I shall tell her how awful it’s been this time. She may want to adjust the dose a bit.

Anyway, to my desk!

Centre stage is the masterboard I made yesterday. Dumped on top of it, to the right, are the template pieces I made for the little boxes to contain my lavender sachets a few weeks back, and the template I made for an angel’s body. Centre back on the desk: my new Dylusions paints which you can read about on the masterboard post. Also on that post, the angel wings which are in the red-topped container to the left of the picture.

As usual, my desk is a bit of a mess. What you can see doesn’t look too bad, but left and right, out of shot, it’s horrendous! I need to have a good tidy up.

Happy WOYWW everybody, and I hope you have a good week, full of creativity.

New Stash, and Gold Seahorse Masterboard

Today I did some art in my studio for the first time for ages! I have several occasions coming up which require cards, and I need to make some fairly quick ones without too much work involved, because energy is in short supply, and I shall be having my third chemo treatment on Friday and who knows how I’m going to feel after that!!

So I thought I would make a masterboard and cut it up and make several cards from it.

I got some very exciting new stash today! First of all, I’d ordered some thin metal angels’ wings from Etsy, along with some vintage mini-bouquets, and they arrived this morning.

I am intending to make moulds from some of these wings, so that I can replicate them in different materials (polymer clay, Friendly Plastic, etc.) depending on how well the moulds go – the metal is very thin and it might be hard to press it down evenly into the moulding putty. Notice the attached haloes on the larger wings! You can bend the halo forwards so that it hovers above the angel’s head! The mini-bouquets are very pretty and I thought I could split these apart and use them for angel embellishments.

Later in the day, the most exciting parcel arrived. I decided not long ago to get the complete set of Dylusions paints. I am so fed up with ruining decent pens by writing with them over acrylic paint – there’s something that reacts and causes the ink in the pen to stop working, and once that happens there’s nothing to be done – the pen is ruined and just has to be thrown away. I read a review of these new paints and was pleased to learn that they are designed specifically for art journaling and of course writing is an essential part of that discipline, and the paints do not cause the pens to clog. I have watched a number of Youtube videos over the past few days and can see how versatile these paints are, and how you can blend them, and create great backgrounds with them. The colours are identical to the Dylusions sprays but their usage is different, and you an get quite a bit more control with them.

I began my masterboard by creating a background from several of these paints. These are some of the materials I used for this masterboard.

I applied the paints using a baby wipe, picking up the smallest amount of paint each time, from inside the lid of the jar. The card I have used for the masterboard isn’t very good quality – it’s A3 office grade card, so I would probably have got better results with the blending if I’d used better quality card. Layer 1 was done with London Blue.

Layer 2 was created with Vibrant Turquoise. With the blending not going quite as well as I’d hoped, I decided to go for a swirling pattern.

Layer 3: Cut Grass.

Layer 4: Squeezed Orange – just a little, between the swirls where there wasn’t so much colour.

Layer 5: Lemon Zest – a very small amount, just to highlight the Squeezed Orange.

For layer 6, I mixed together some Vibrant Turquoise and some White Linen to produce a paler shade.

Creating Layer 6:

Time for some stamping. I used the water droplets stamp from Designs by Ryn, with Ranger Cobalt Archival Ink.

At this point I felt that the whole thing was much too bright and the water droplets were too dark, so I decided to apply a wash with some White Linen paint mixed with some water.

I applied this with a foam brush over the entire surface of the masterboard, but it left quite a lot of streaks, so I took a fan brush and made swirling brush strokes through the wash, which gave a better effect.

The wash completed. I am much happier with this result. The colour is much more subtle and the water droplets not so obvious.

Time to stamp the shells. I used Distress Inks for this, but they didn’t go down onto the acrylic surface very well, and took quite a bit of drying with my heat gun, but in the end I was quite pleased with the result.

I began with the little starfish from the Seven Gypsies set, using Tea Dye Distress Ink, but this came out quite pale with a slightly greenish cast over the turquoise background.

For the scallop shell I used Gathered Twigs Distress Ink:

and for the other shell, Rusty Hinge.

The shell stamping completed.

Time to add the heat-embossed seahorses. The seahorse stamp came from the same Seven Gypsies set as the shells.

The gold embossed seahorses complete. I completed four at a time.

I think you can see how nice and shiny they are in the photograph. I wanted to add a bit more sparkle, so I applied some variegated copper gilding flakes in small patches, using a glue pen, and stippling them on with a brush, and then brushing off the excess.

Here is the completed masterboard, showing the shiny seahorses and gilding flakes.

I am very pleased with the new paints. If the quality of the card had been better I think the blending might have gone better, but I like the way the colours go together, and how you can control them, and lighten or darken the effect with the addition of white or black, and other colour mixing, giving you the full range of colours. In their raw state the colours are very vibrant and not a bit subtle, and I think for most of the time I shall be mixing them for a gentler, more subtle effect. The addition of a white colour wash certainly improved this piece, I think.