A little birdie

I am thrilled to be featured on the Country View Crafts Projects blog. Today it's a page in my small Dylusions Journal.

Cover Art

I am thrilled to have a project featured on the Country View Crafts Project blog today. Please pop over to see how it was made.

 

Rusty Things

The theme at Country View Crafts Challenges is 'Rust' and I made a rusty looking tag. 
I covered a small tag in metal tape and then embossed the tag with a Texture Fade.
I started the rusting process by covering the tag with Little Black Dress Fresco paint by putting a small amount of paint on some Cut and Dry foam and tapping the foam on the tag. I didn't want a smooth surface as rusty surfaces are anything but smooth so tapping works best for me! 
I then built up several layers using Mocha Mousse, Chutney and Smoked Paprika. I probably made a total of about 30 layers building up the colours and trying to ensure a random spread of colour. I added a little black in the odd place here and there as I was building the layers to keep the overall effect non-uniform.
Then I added some Copper Treasure Gold on the tag and added more paint on top to 'knock' the Treasure Gold backwards.
On the accents (the house, bird and large flower) I used the same techniques as above but added a little Captain Peacock to the edges so they stood out against the tag. It's really an opportunity to experiment and if you don't like the effect you can cover it up and start again! My only advice would be to try and be random in your application of the paint as a rusty object in real life is not uniformly rusty.
I hope you find your inner rustiness and join in with us this month!

My Dyary Cover

I wanted to take a while before decorating the cover of my Dyary because I wanted to get a sense of its style. Every journal has its own heart don't you think?! So this weekend I decided to be brave and put paint to cardboard!

The front and back have the same treatment with the same paint colours, stencils and stamps used. The cover has a debossed box and so I scraped the paint that covered the debossed shape. I might draw in the shape with a paint pen at some point in the future... not decided yet!
On the front I added a tag with the dictionary definition of 'journal'. A close up is here:

The back cover shows 'the end' and I didn't like the what I'd done to the head of the chap so replaced it with a skull thinking that pretty accurately represents another end!

I know that this cover is about 95% finished - once I get a paint pen in my hand and a spare five minutes I'm sure I'll add some doodling! As the dyary will last until December I wanted to leave something for later in the year! 
Thank you, as always, for popping by!

Dyary - Week Commencing 27 March

I am really enjoy my Dyary - as much as for keeping a record of a snippet of each day as for taking the opportunity to really mix up the stash in my Studio. I loved the background of this page so made a complementary tag and added Wendy's tulip. Next week's page is one of the pre-printed pages so I'm off to do some colouring in!

Rust

It's a new month and a new challenge at Country View Crafts Challenges and for my first project this month I made a mdf plaque look rusty!
I started by covering the plaque with Little Black Dress Fresco paint by putting a small amount of paint on some Cut and Dry foam and tapping the foam on the plaque. I didn't want a smooth surface as rusty surfaces are anything but smooth! I then built up several layers using Mocha Mousse, Chutney, Captain Peacock and Smoked Paprika. I probably made a total of about 30 layers building up the colours and trying to ensure a random spread of colour - this is the plaque about halfway through the process.

I then added Copper Treasure Gold and added more paint over the top. Then I added a little torn piece of paper and some embellishments I treated the same way as the background.

Thank you for sharing my project today - I hope you find your inner rustiness!