Welcome Back Alison Bomber Project #1 A Study In Scarlet ....

"Hello everyone, Alison here again. I’m so delighted to be back, but I will admit to a slight frustration with this month’s projects. My main idea of what I wanted to create simply wouldn’t come together. I’ve saved it up in my head to try again at some point in the future when there’s less house-moving pressure in the mix. So, I’m a bit down on these makes, only because they’re not what I intended - maybe you’ll be able to judge them with less prejudice !"

I’m working with the Ink & the Dog stamps this month - absolutely in love with the quirky, crazy, fascinating images. My first offering is a sort of journal page, made in an old book.  I’ve seen this idea in a few places, one of the most recent being at Magda Polakow’s great blog (http://littleeverland.blogspot.co.uk/).

So I started with giving the pages a rough layer of Snowflake Fresco Paint. 

I spritzed some water on, and brushed some of the paint away, so that the text would still have a presence.

Next I took some of the new teeny tiny tags, in sizes #1, #2 and #3, as well as some offcuts from larger tags, and layered them up with some wide mesh from my stash.

Once happy with the arrangement, I glued them into place, and added textured areas of Grunge Paste.

I applied it with a plastic palette knife, and then just patted the flat side of the knife up and down on the paste to get the miniature mountain peaks.

Next step was to give all of that a wash of Snowflake to blend it all together.

Lots of my favourite blogs are Polish, including the wonderful Anna Dabrowska a.k.a. Finnabair (with whom I was lucky enough to do a workshop last month), and they do lots of spritzing and spraying, so I decided to borrow that idea; and I also took a leaf out of our own Gillian’s book, by doing my spritzing and spraying using Fresco Paints.

So I gathered a mix of colours and created a spray. If you put the water into the spray bottle first, the paint won’t stick to the sides so much. I used about 75% water to 25% paint I would guess and, as you can see, I used all translucent colours. Obviously, mixed with water, even your opaques would become less opaque... but these were the shades I wanted.

I wanted some really intense colour in places, as well as the lovely delicate diffusion of colour which the spray gives. So, before spraying, I used a wooden coffee stirrer to add globs of Blood Orange to various points of intersection, corners and edges where tags or mesh overlapped.

Then I spritzed over those globs (at this point about equal amounts of the three colours in the spray), hoping that the spray would disperse the paint a little. It did, but only a very little.

So I used a paintbrush to “help” the paint to spread out. I guided it along the texture available - into cracks, along edges and so on, trying to make it look as though the paint had travelled there “naturally”.

Here you can see the whole page spread at this point, with one glob already spread out (top right-ish), and the others still awaiting action. I couldn’t hang around too long, since I didn’t want my globs drying as globs, but the moisture of the spray does give you some play time.

It was all a little bit too pink at this point, so I added a bit more of the Smoked Paprika to what was left in the spray bottle, and did another spritzing with the slightly more orangey colour. I love how this warmed up the pages, adding another layer of colour - I forgot to take a photo, but you will see it as we go on.

ID Dolls 1 

 ID Eclectic 4

Time to get some stamping into the mix.  I knew I wanted to use my favourite of the Ink & the Dogs Dolls (you’ll be seeing lots more of them later in the week), but there was no way I could stamp onto all that texture, so she needed a background, and the quote, from the Ink & the Dog Eclectic plate 4 has always spoken to me, so that had to play a part too.

I whitewashed a couple of bits of manila tag with watered down Snowflake, and then put a spritz of my now quite orangey spray onto the craft mat.

I smooshed the white-painted tag into the spray, dried, and re-smooshed until I liked the look of it.

I positioned my Doll and the quote, and added some stamping around the pages using Plum Archival.  You can also see the delicious orangey tints from the additional spraying here. 

The postmark is from Dolls 1, and the lovely script is on the Dolls2 plate.

ID Dolls 2

And then came one of my favourite parts of the process.  Having got it all glued down, sprayed and stamped, I started peeling up the edges of anything I could get my fingers on!

I love how this suddenly brings the pages to life.

Of course it adds dimension and texture, but where the tag edges are peeled back, you also reveal unsprayed areas, giving you white highlights and even, in places, some more book print too.

I also used a Sanding Block to attack the textured Grunge Paste, creating additional white highlights amidst the now pretty intense colour.  

Regulars at Words and Pictures will know that I tend to work in adjacent shades on the colour spectrum, rather than leaping across to huge contrasts - hence the post title - borrowed from Sherlock Holmes, of course.

I also had a lightbulb moment and decided to experiment with peeling away part of the mesh in places.

So happy with how this revealed extra white highlighting, as well as giving some really funky texture variation

It also gave me some leftover bits of mesh covered in yummy coloured Grunge Paste...

... so I used them to adorn the stamped panels of the Doll...

 

... and the quote.

Overall, I’ve ended up very happy with all the texture and detail.

And I’m looking forward to having a play in the rest of this book.  I’ve already decided that it’s going to be dedicated to the other Dolls, so keep an eye out at Words and Pictures to see how the others turn out!

Thanks so much for stopping by.  I’ll be back tomorrow with another Ink & the Dog creation - hope to see you then.

Leandra Says: It's been on my to do list to make a video about spraying the paints for some time now. You can really use Opaques and Translucent shades in different ways to obliterate of build depth nicely, and you can vary the opacity and viscosity depending on your ratios of paint to water. Frescos are a fantastically versatile paint, and you have highlighted this perfectly! I love the texture on your pages, and peeling up bits is a fantastic idea. The re-positioned mesh looks superb too!!

Gillian Says: Spraying with Fresco's are just so much fun .... I love all the different elements you used to create your textured layers. The colours and images look fab.