INKY FINGERS

What a great challenge over at TIOT – Slap it on!

I had a great playday, with Gesso and inks, experimenting with Oxides over Gesso and creating a bit of texture with some of my favourite leafy stamps.

My page didn’t work out quite as I’d planned, but I still like the end result.

I’d decided to take photos as I played, so here they are:-

First some scribbles with Neocolor watercolour pastels, then painted with water.

You may wonder why I bothered with that when you see the next step… but so did I, to be honest

I applied gesso to the page, which I need to water down a little, but I needed to build it up around the edges, so I left it as it was. I then stamped leaves into the parts where I’d slapped it on thickly, to create some texture. Next, I started to add ink – Oxides – in autumn shades…

…building up colour gradually, and spritzing with water and drying with a heat tool between colours, then overstamping with various leaf stamps in the same shades of Oxide.

Finally, some touches of Gold (Delicata and Treasure Brass) and Autumn words stamped randomly, with the quote in the centre.

Final result… I’ll show a photo and a scan side by side. It was hard to photograph the shading because the gold bits were reflecting! Neither is totally accurate.

While creating the page, I did another page next to it but started by stamping off the gesso from the stamps, so that there were some gessoed bits and just added Oxides over the top.  The rest of it was completed as above.

Side by Side…

It was so much fun getting messy with Gesso – something I haven’t done for a while.

I do hope you’ll join us over at TIOT for this fortnightly challenge – it’s a great chance to get messy!

The Throwdown Tuesday challenge is to ‘Add Texture’, so I’d like to enter that with my page along with That’s Crafty’s  Forever Autumn Challenge.

See you soon!

Thanks for looking

Cath

xxx

I’m not feeling blue at all, but there are a couple of ‘Blue’ or ‘Frosty Colour’ challenges around and I thought I’d share some of my latest cards.…

More pink than blue, perhaps…

This one’s clean and simple…

…and this is a page in my journal from yesterday…

…which I really liked, so I made a card the same way. Just goes to show how much difference gesso and a bit of white paint makes. I changed the words because I wasn’t too impressed with the way the first two stamped when I used them. They are still there, but in gold ink, so you can’t see them on this. There’s a lot of gold on this card…mainly crackles but you can’t see them in the photo.

I’ll enter one of these into the following challenges:

Allsorts Challenge – No Patterned papers

That’s Crafty Challenges – Feeling Blue

Stamping Sensations – Cold and Frosty Colours

Addicted to Stamps – Clean and Simple

Try It On Tuesday – My Favourite Things

Frilly and Funky – Three of Something

Country View Challenges – Anything Goes

I’ll be back soon.

Thanks for looking!

Cath

xxx

PS I’m unable to upload at the moment – Bad Gateway????!? I’ll try again later…x

Here are some BI (before ink) and AI (after ink) samples.

The first one is peeled paper – though it doesn’t show up very well. They don’t make Sellotape like they used to… lol!

This one’s just Gesso, applied randomly – hard to see it on the top tag - sorry.

Next we have gesso on torn book pages. You can really see the faux texture on the second tag.

It's a while since I used Gesso :)

Thanks to those of you who corrected my spelling (Duh!) AND to Carol for reminding me of my schooldays, with her reminder of how to decline a Latin noun, lol!

I'm still alive - honestly! Here are some of the clocks made by some of the Stamp Camp attendees - excellent work. These were all created with Adirondack Pigment inks and Gesso, using Grunge Board elements as stencils. We coated them with fixative, then put them through the Xyron, with repositionable adhesive, so they'd just wipe off, ready for the next person to use. This was my first (and only) play with Adirondack pigment inks and I have to say I love them. I've used mainly dye inks for the last few years, apart from the odd play with chalk inks and Brilliance, so it was a real pleasure to have something which blended so well and so easily. The inks flow on canvas and on paper and only need to be quickly blasted with the heat tool to make them permanent. Isn't it great to see how much variety there is? I love it when people all do the same project but the results are totally unique.
If you'd like to see more of the photos from Stamp Camp 2008, you can see them here. Artwork can be seen here, though I have more to upload.

Just been getting ready a background for Inchies and ATCs. The theme is yellow - not one I would normally use as I'm not a big fan of yellow on its own, but it's more of a challenge because of that.

I started my playing with gesso again today - finally - haven't done much, but thought I'd post the bits I do as I do them, so you can see any experiments and disasters and learn from them.......

So here's the first pair. You can see that the gesso (the lighter bits) has acted as a resist to the inks over the dictionary pages and the pages soak up much more ink where there is no gesso, giving an illusion of texture and a variety of colour shades. I used Distress inks (Mustard Seed and Aged Mahogany) over the pages, after applying the Gesso with a Splodger. More experiments as I do them..........