Sea-Themed Altered Box

Another of several posts for today!

This is the first of four boxes that I have completed, from my tissue paper collage boxes project. You can read about the beginning of this project here. I began with the blue-green one, which was to have a seaside theme, as a gift for a friend celebrating a significant birthday.

This was the development of a similar box I altered back in May 2012. Here it is for comparison.

The first step was to add some waves to the sides of the box, and I did this by applying a fairly thick layer of Finnabair 3D transparent matte gel medium all around, with a palette knife, and I then went around again with the palette knife, “sculpting” the wave shapes.

I then sprinkled on some glass micro-beads over a bowl to catch the excess, which I then poured back into the jar. A lot of them fell off over the next hour or so and it remained to be seen how many would still be stuck on after the gel medium had dried!

As soon as the gel medium had formed a skin on the surface, I applied some coarse pumice gel medium to the lid, leaving a space for what would be a small rock pool, and sculpting some of it to resemble sand over which the waves had left an impression.

I had to leave the box overnight at this stage as the gel mediums needed to be thoroughly dry before applying any paint or embellishments.

In the meantime, I turned to the embellishments. I got out my jar of small air-dry clay pebbles which I made some time ago for my stash, and a selection of natural coloured fluid acrylic paints.

I painted a base coat of cream over the entire surface of each of the selected pebbles, and then applied some of the beige and a little of the white, in what I hope is a realistic representation of pebbles you find on the beach. Turning each pebble around in my fingers in order to paint the entire surface was quite good because my fingers tended to smudge and blend the paint somewhat, giving a more natural appearance.

The final task that evening was to make the starfish. I had a silicone mould that I’d made from a starfish charm – you can see that it had a ring on the top, but this can be cut off the finished piece. I made it from Fimo air-dry clay (the same as the pebbles) and popped it out of the mould and left it to dry overnight.

The next day, when it is dry, I was able to trim off the ring and the excess clay around the edges.

Here is the side of the box now that the transparent gel medium has dried. I have put a moulded clay face underneath it to tip it up a bit so you can see it better.

I felt that there wasn’t enough contrast, so I added some of the gorgeous Daler Rowney pearlescent acrylic inks, brushing them on and dabbing it with kitchen paper and repeating the process until I got the desired result. These liquid acrylics really shimmer!

The glass microbeads were still falling off, so I decided the only thing for it was to add some soft gloss gel medium to keep them stuck on.

Here is the box once the gel medium had dried. The glass microbeads were nice and firmly stuck now.

Moving on to the lid, I filled the “rock pool” with Glossy Accents.

I then moved on to the inside of the box. I have given this a lot of thought and wondered what I could do that would echo the sea theme but also be a contrast. Years ago I went on an embroidery course where we learnt box making and the teacher said that every box should contain a surprise. I love this idea!

After a good night’s sleep, I decided that in this case, the box should be like the inside of a shell, lined with nacre (mother of pearl). I did a search online for a technique to create faux mother of pearl, and did some experiments. I have done a separate blog post about this here.

All the boxes were prepared in advance by painting a coat of gesso inside and out, and now I went over this with titanium white acrylic paint on the inside of the box and lid to give a smooth white surface.

The first step in creating the mother of pearl effect was to dab on some distress ink in Spun Sugar and Broken China, using a screwed up piece of cling film.

I repeated the process, this time using Liquid Pearls.

After this I applied a layer of Finnabair 3D transparent matt gel medium, using the smallest palette knife I have got, which reaches into the bottom of the box. After applying it fairly roughly, I went over it with a large flat brush, slightly moistened, to smooth out the roughness, and I used curving brush strokes to resemble the inside of a shell. Unfortunately this doesn’t show up very well on the photo.

I couldn’t do any more on the inside until this gel medium was dry, so I got out my Daler Rowney pearlescent acrylic inks again, and painted them on around the rim of the box. With these boxes there is always the danger of applying too much paint, which means that the lids won’t go on, but this stuff is so thin that I thought it would be OK. In the photo, you can see the edge of the tissue paper collage, which shows how thick this is, and how if it went to the top of the box, the lid definitely wouldn’t have gone on.

Also while waiting for the inside to dry, I decided to paint the sand on the top of the lid. I mixed together several of my Pebeo fluid acrylic paints till I got the right sand colour, and painted the coarse pumice gel medium which I’d sculpted into a rough sandy shape, and which had dried nice and hard. I carefully avoided the rock pool in the centre, but any stray paint wiped straight off the shiny surface of the Glossy Accents.

Here are a couple of close-ups of the painted sand.

For this photo, I propped the lid up on one side so that you can see how thick the sand is, and also the wave pattern on the side of the lid, done with the Daler Rowney acrylic inks, gel medium and glass microbeads.

I thought that for the surprise inside the box, I’d put a single pearl, as in an oyster. Going through my stash, in my “Junk Jewellery” box I found this necklace. Whenever I go to village fetes I pick up loads of junk jewellery – some of it is actually quite nice and I wear it, but there’s a lot of pretty awful stuff, but if you can look beyond that and see instead the elements that make it up, there’s often some quite useable stuff. I chose one of the large pearls from this necklace and removed it by straightening the wire which was threaded through it, and put it in the bowl of embellishments for the box.

I returned later, once the gel medium on the inside of the box had dried. However, I wasn’t quite happy with the 3D matte medium, even though this was my first choice of the experimental samples I’d done. Inside the box, I felt it needed a bit more sheen, so I added a coat of Finnabair heavy body gloss medium.

Here is the completed mother of pearl lining to the box. In real life, the colour shows up a bit more, and it’s more lustrous.

Painting the starfish. I used my Pebeo fluid acrylics for this.

Assembling the embellishments on the box lid, and about to make the seaweed from thin strips of green tissue paper torn from scraps. I stuck the embellishments to the lid of the box with Pinflair glue, and made the seaweed and stuck it down with soft gloss gel medium.

The single pearl inside the mother of pearl lined box, stuck down with Pinflair glue.

Finally, some photos of the completed box, once the gel medium on the seaweed was dry.

The box opened, revealing the mother of pearl lining and the little pearl.

I gave my friend this little box on Friday, and I am happy to say she was delighted with it.

Natural Things

Some beauty in nature to share with you for my second post of the day.

Last week, my hubby had just dropped our neighbour off at the train station and he found a baby squirrel on the ground, that had obviously fallen out of its nest. Being far too soft-hearted, he brought it home! I would have left it for its mother to find, and however sweet and furry they are, they are still rather a pest, not being indigenous to our islands and driving our native red squirrels to near extinction, and also causing quite a lot of damage to the trees. However, once he’d brought it home, we had the responsibility of looking after it, but I told him that we were neither equipped, or experienced, to deal with this on a long-term basis, and a solution must immediately be found.

Heart-melting, isn’t it.

It really was the sweetest little thing. We gave it some milk from a syringe and it simply guzzled it down – it was clearly very hungry and thirsty – and then made a bed for it with an old towel in our cat basket and put it in a different room where the cats wouldn’t find it, and kept feeding it every few hours, and in the meantime, we both did some online research until we found a squirrel rescue place. Our first attempts at contacting the volunteers in our area that this place recommended were not successful, and I was worried about long-term commitment, looking after this baby.

However, eventually a more qualified person was found, and the next day my hubby took it off to its new home.

We were told that it was a female, approximately five weeks old. Cow’s milk was apparently not the best thing for it, but it had done pretty well and we’d probably saved its life, but it is now in a better environment and being fed more suitable food.

I told my hubby not to bring any more baby wild animals home!!!

The second “nature” pictures I wanted to show you were of some beautiful cobwebs in our garden this morning. We have now entered autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” – we’ve certainly got apples on the tree which we have started harvesting, and our late raspberries, and baby tomatoes, and the last of the rhubarb – and as for the mists, well, we’ve got those aplenty too – it’s been quite foggy here over the past couple of days.

I looked out of an upstairs window and was astonished to see a miriad of cobwebs in the garden, highlighted by tiny droplets of water from the mist, and knew I had to photograph them. I called my hubby and we went out together to look at them, and as I was “oooh! ahhh!”-ing, all he said was, “this garden’s a huge death trap!” Lol!!

I suppose there are always this many cobwebs in the garden, but most of the time we just don’t see them.

I have enhanced these photos slightly, increasing the contrast so the cobwebs show up better – they were not so good on the original photos as in real life.

Beautiful, aren’t they. It’s a wonder that the spiders know where to begin, to make these webs, suspended across quite wide spaces sometimes.

Tissue Paper Collage Boxes

The first of several posts for today.

This is one of several posts unveiling some work I’ve done recently that’s been under wraps because it was for a friend’s birthday and I didn’t want to spoil her surprise.

Several years ago I bought a quantity of these small papier mache boxes at a craft show. I have altered a few over the years and decided to do one for this friend, and I thought I would do the base layer on several simultaneously.

When I bought the boxes, they were brown in colour, and I immediately painted them all with gesso in readiness for altering.

The base for these four boxes is tissue paper collage. I chose a selection of coloured tissue papers from my stash. Every time I receive a gift wrapped in tissue paper I keep it, and I’ve now got quite a nice collection of different colours. They are all recycled.

A lesson I learned from embellishing these boxes from before was that if you decorate the sides of the boxes right to the top, the lids won’t go on! They are a perfect fit in their unembellished state. The first step, therefore, is to put the lid on and draw a pencil line around the box to indicate how far up the decoration can go.

I tore some of the tissue paper into strips. All paper has a “grain” and is stronger in one direction than the other, but I have noticed with tissue paper that this is very pronounced indeed, and in one direction it is impossible to tear it in any controlled way; a right angles, it tears straight down.

Here are the boxes with their tissue paper collage applied with soft matt gel medium. If you use firmer gel medium it tends to rip the paper. The boxes are upside down, drying. You can see that I have left the top edge of each box uncovered.

The lids covered, awaiting trimming.

Once they were dry, I trimmed around the edge of the lids with scissors.

The pink and blue/green boxes were too brightly-coloured and with too much contrast for what I wanted, so I proceeded to paint them with an acrylic glaze made with titanium white and some acrylic polymer (better than water for diluting the paint, as it does not affect the adhering quality of the paint). Here is the first one, together with its lid, so far unpainted, to show the difference.

The two boxes with their coat of acrylic glaze.

At this stage I still wasn’t quite happy with them, and set them aside to work on later, while I looked at the other two. The green one I decided to leave as it was for now.

For the brownish one, I had used some tissue paper that had some printing on it (I think this was wrapped around some flowers that I was given, and I kept it because it was unusual).  You can see the darker lines in the brown tissue paper in the following photo. I didn’t want to lighten this box, but added a glaze made with transparent yellow iron oxide paint. One coat of this didn’t make too much difference, so I added some more of the neat paint, sparingly, which gave a lovely golden effect.

I dabbed on some Distress Stains in various colours on the boxes (some Tarnished Brass on the brownish-green box, and some Brushed Pewter on the blue-green one) and spread it around with a soft brush. Not a lot of difference in appearance but a nice shimmery finish. It did bobble up a bit, being water based on the acrylic gel medium but it seems to have dried OK.

This is the completion of the first stage in altering the boxes. I shall be doing further blog posts about them as I complete them, including the blue-green one which I had ear-marked for my friend’s birthday present. Please see the next post for the completion of this box.