Part 3 - squishy moulds

Have you noticed how in interior design trends, embossed metal is really huge these days? I have seen Laura Ashley selling metal embossed lamp bases, furniture and candle sticks, and metallic things have been huge as accents for the home for a couple of years. 

A couple of years back, metallic accents for the home started out gold and silver, and now we are moving to softer metallics like Champagne and Platinum shades which work beautifully with deep wintery shades of chocolate, plum, aubergine, burgundy but platinum and champagne. Soft metallics go equally well with pale modern colours like duck egg blue, latte, sage or pistachio, through to coral, salmon pinks or lilac.


You don't have to pay a fortune to get these effects. With metal, moulds and a few metal working tools, you can easily create your own pieces for the home. Maybe start with something simple like a picture frame, or chipboard shape, mini book to practise your ideas then move onto covering a box or a wooden or paper mache shape before takling something huge like a chest of drawer! The principles are the same though, just on a different scale.


Recently we have aded some moulds to our website. Moulds can be a bit like tummy buttons: innies or outies! and which side of the metal is the finished side? It's up to you if you have the innie up or down, or the outie up or down. These options can make moulds look so different.



Lin Brown from LB crafts taught me how to make the diamond mould have a greater variety of uses by pushing the rainsed portions back down again. On this mould there are 'up' diamonds and 'down' diamonds which form the mould pattern, but you can press all the raised ones down to make ridges to separate all the flat diamond areas. Like this.

To do this effect try the following

• cut a piece of metal to fit the wooden or chipboard shape you are using as your substrate. Trace around the metal with your teflon tool. Cut out.
• Use 1 or 2 small pieces of masking tape to hold the metal on the diamond mould. Emboss some of the diamonds onto the metal.No need to do the whole piece, maybe a few at the top or bottom. 
• First use the paper stump to follow the pattern, follow this with the round teflon tool, then the pointed teflon tool to sharply define the mould. Remove metal from the mould.
• place the metal on your acrylic mat, and use the paper stump to flatten all the un moulded parts. This is a tidy up.
• Now use the paper stump to gently squash down any of the raised diamonds. this will naturally form a ridge as you start in the centre of the diamond and gradually flatten to the edge. Again refine with the rounded the pointed teflon tools.
• Repeat for all the raised diamonds until you have a pattern of ridges as per the sample above.

Use humungo adhesive to stick the metal onto the substrate. Now you are ready to distress. This may be with ferro, terra, black acrylic paint, coloured acrylic paints and glimmer mists. These products will all create different effects.


On the sample above, I further added to each diamond with scribbled patterns, texture wheels etc to add more interest. Then I used black kaisercolour acrylic paint to antique the metal followed by glimmer mists.


Then I further embellished with a clock and a row of ball and cups.

You can also try this idea on the Kabuka grid mould found here, or the other big daddy mould 1 which gives this effect.

This sample also has terra texture paste which has been stamped into, and coloured with kaiser colour paints, with accents of viva precious metallic colour paints.

Here is another sample, this time with ferro and viva and precious metal colour paints all over the top of the metal. (yes those paints stick to anything!!!)

 

This is a close up of the mould bit. i think next time I will take the ferro right up to the edges of the mould.

So there you have it, the 3rd tutorial from more of last weekend's samples made in demos at the Artisan show. You don't have to use these moulds which you squish down, you can do the same idea with any other mould too, and leave it raised up, paint it then use the paints etc...I'm sure you can figure out lots of other ways to run with this idea!! Have some fun.


Leandra