2015 #6 Creating Woodgrain with Grunge Paste {by Lou Collins}

2015 Theme 6: Grunge Paste

Hi everyone Lou Collins here, joining you this evening with a post about creating a wood grain effect with Grunge Paste and Fresco Paints. Wood grain is a very popular finish for both backgrounds and embellishments at the moment, so I thought it would be fun to find a different way of creating our own. My project is an old clipboard I have had hanging around for a while, which I thought would look lovely in my kitchen as a receipts holder, when teamed with the new Jo Firth-Young Bee's stamp set.

Step One: Begin by roughly mixing some PaperArtsy Grunge Paste with some Toffee Fresco Paint. You do not want a solid colour, so only mix slightly until there is very little white left, but plenty of brown variations.

Step Two: With a palette knife, Smear the mixed paste on the bottom of the piece you are colouring, in this case, my clipboard. Squeeze straight from the bottles, some small blobs of Toffee, Haystack and Slate over the paste. 

Step Three: With your palette knife, or an old store card, drag the paste in one direction only up over the board., allowing the paint and paste to naturally mix in vertical lines. Keep the paste quite thick...the more texture the better! 

Step Four: When you are happy, begin to dry the top coat of your paste off. Hold the heat gun in areas for an extended period to deliberately create bubbles for even more texture. 

Step Five: Now tome down the colours within the wood grain effect  by giving it a thin wash of Fresco Paint in Toffee mixed with 50% water.

Step Six: Whilst the underneath of the paste and paint mix is still wet, ink up the honeycomb stamp with Timber Brown StazOn (archival ink Coffee would also be good) and stamp around the edges of the clipboard so that you get an impression into the paste. Remember the paste should be touch dry on the upper layer, so you should not get your stamps messy. 

...and here is a close up of the finished piece, teamed with stamped and coloured images from the JOFY30 Stamp set and some garden twine. 

This would be a great technique to try with different colours...perhaps pale blues for a new baby boy project, or light coloured whites and creams with Toffee for a whitewashed effect?

Of course this would also work on paper as well as wood or chipboard, but ensure a paper is a good quality thickness. You wouldn't want it warping too much. Have some excess paste and paint left over? Why not spread it on some scraps of cardstock and when dry punch out some wood grain circles, hearts or butterflies to add to future projects?

I hope you've enjoyed todays tutorial. You can find more of my crafty antics on my facebook page Lou Collins Designs 

Wow Lou, this really looks like a brilliant wood grain effect, and so easy to do! Love the dragging of the colours, and works perfectly with Jo's Bee stamps too! THanks for sharing, I bet a lot of people will be trying this on tags and chipboard! ~Leandra

We would love you to join in with challenge #6: Grunge Paste If you are inspired by any of our guests who blog with us over the fortnight, then please join in and link up your creativity HERE.

NB.  you will get 3 weeks to participate in this challenge, as we will interrupt the usual schedule for our 3UP week which starts April 5th.

All links go in the draw to win a voucher to spend on products of your choice from the PaperArtsy online store. The Grunge Paste link will close 17:00 (London Time) Sunday, April 12th, winner will be announced 2 hours later at 19:00