2019 #15 Coral: Vintage Botanical Tea with Scrapcosy Stamps {by Raquel Burillo}

2019 Topic 15: Coral

Some infusions magic for you in this post, but in true Raquel-style, she also has paints, inks, and many techniques for you to contemplate. This is a bright spread for her, and it seems many of these colours are outside her usual comfort zone, so what about you, will you turn your hand to a new shade of coral ?? you know you want to!!! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Raquel (scrapcosy) with you today, and I'd like to share with you this art journal spread inspired by my tea set collection and the coral colour. I used very simple techniques, not many steps, but the result is a vintage tea garden full of details achieved with minimal art supplies (in terms of colour), but lots of stamps... I couldn't help but use my entire tea stamp set collection!

As you may know, I love to add colour with infusions, so these will be the main supplies I used, but not the only ones. I wanted to add a touch of paint as well, so I couldn't resist to use one of the new colours recently released which perfectly matches with my colour palette. Can you find out which one it is? Let's see first the result and then I'll give you more details and a video with all the steps as well.

Since the topic was coral, it was only natural that I would explore the 24 colours of infusions and I would select the one which resembled more the living coral (Pantone colour of the year 2019). I may be wrong, but my selected colour was Orange County, a colour that to be honest, I had never used before, since among the shortlist were 2 of my all time favourites Rusty Car and Sunset Beach. But this time I decided to set those to one side. Terracotta was also very promising, I'll come back to that one in the future too. And to add some contrast I went and chose again a colour that it's not in my preferred list at all, but I know in Spain this colour is killing it! Is a Bit Jaded  a favourite of yours as well maybe?

And since I love metallics, I thought that WOW embossing powder in gold (Metallic Gold Rich Pale - superfine detail) would be a nice touch to add here and there. So this became my basic palette.

In addition to Infusions I also used these 2 paints: Chalk Fresco Acrylic Paint and the new Cayenne (available ONLY from approved PaperArtsy stockists - see here), which perfectly matches Orange County.

I selected all these stamps ESC13, ESC14, ESC15 and ESC16. I was particularly interested in all flowers, laces, cups and postage stamps from the collection, as you will see.

And I selected the stencil PS105 as well

Let's talk about the background first.

First layer is Chalk Fresco Acrylic Paint, added to cover the book pages, but
still leave a hint of the letters visible behind.

The next layer is sprinkles of Orange County Infusions spritzed with water. If you see, the edges of the page (porous surface, since I added less paint at the edges) have richer infusions colour and more spots than the rest of the page (which is less porous due to the paint layer).

Next, using the Tea cloud stamp from ESC16 "inked up" with leftovers of wet infusions from my craft-sheet, I stamped all over the page. In this case it's a very subtle result which can be only seen on the lower-left of the picture below. Depending on the amount of water and infusions you use (how wet the stamp is and how much colour there is on it) you'll get
different results.

Then, using a brush to get more dirty water from my craft-sheet I did some splashes. Please note, if there is no leftover of dirty gorgeous infused water on your craft-sheet at any of the 2 previous steps above, just create a puddle to splash with on purpose!

And once all Infusions layers are done, we go back to the paint and use Cayenne, which sits underneath the 3 clusters I created for the spread. I just used a stencil brush to apply it before I stuck anything on the page.

My next step was stamping all the flowers, lace, cups and postage stamps from my tea stamp sets below on Smoothy Card stock using VersaFine Clair Pine cone ink (waterproof ink). Then I water-coloured the images with Infusions Orange County, and a Bit Jaded. Once all was dry fussy cut the lot. Gosh! Cutting all that took me AGES!! I also stamped (same ink) and embossed with WOW Embossing Powder some elements in vellum and in regular smoothy.

At this point all those little pieces are nice and flat and clean. If you ask me, they are too flat and too clean for me, so now it's when I add my vintage touch with regular distress ink (Tea dye, another new for me) and some well needed volume using my fingers and nails and the back of some brushes.

Here you can (hopefully) see an example of the 3D added to the little flower in ESC14 (I bet many people missed that this flower exists on that set !! There are 11 individual elements in ESC14... yes, 11! And Leandra and her elves must hate me for including all those pieces that they have to cut when they produce their stamps... (sorry guys!!) I bet now many of you will go up the post and have a second look at the picture of the stamp set :P)

Once all is ready, it's time to play to get the pieces to their final spots, but of course, I don't have a design for the spread 100% clear in my mind, I just had a rough idea of having a sentiment on the left page (Keep Calm and drink tea) surrounded by some elements and then having the bottom right corner full of detail and climbing up and left the spread. I also wanted to preserve some "white space" areas. So you can see the original first arrangement and how, after many hours and few days later, it actually ended up.

After all those hours spent arranging and re-arranging I felt like a florist moving all the flowers and cups and butterflies until I found the perfect arrangement - at least from my point of view. And also had in mind that I didn't want to cut more pieces (enough scissors for a while!), so I had to almost do magic with just 3 stamped tea plants of ESC16 to get all those green leaves into my composition. I may have chopped one of those plants in 4 parts or more...

The little paper pieces were moving so much (they are slippery!) while arranging them that I built up each cluster using sellotape on the back of the elements, adding one thing after the other, to keep them in place. So basically formed three clusters. Here is the title one. I originally wanted to stamp on the page but somehow I thought it may look too boring so I decided to highlight it somehow. It kind of ended up in a cross shape with all little bits and pieces of lace and some leftover flowers stamps and a butterfly.

Here is the left corner cluster. I love the postage stamp cloud in ESC15. It's a fantastic piece to create your own ephemera. And all the tea words around it can be used for different purposes as you'll see in the different clusters (they've become a lace, see title above, a word below and part of a label, three pictures below)

And the huge cluster. Here is the top part of it where I left some butterflies flying around.

And the bottom part, maybe one of my favourite sections of the spread, with that label in vellum and all the tiny leaves arranged with the postage stamps and the laces.

I glued everything mainly with mod-podge and I gave both pages a layer of it on top which then allowed me to work with distress crayons for the first time... I used the Vintage Photo one. I also used the Vintage Photo distress ink, so between the 2 supplies I managed to get some shadowing around the elements in the page.

I also used some foam adhesive to create 3D effect in the butterflies as well as in the cups. Check the result in the picture below. By the way, when I designed this tea collection of stamps I had in mind that I wanted to create a pile of cups and I love I finally decided to give it a go and how this tower of cups turned out, with spoons coming out from different directions.

Just a final picture from me, showing more 3D goodness which I love.

And if you want to see more, here is the link to the video.

I really had fun creating this spread. It was a hard work with scissors and a harder work to decide the final arrangement but I'm very pleased with the result and I can't wait to do more fussy cutting in the future. I love how collaging all bits and pieces give you the flexibility to not commit to a final stamped image on the page and let you play freely with your design until you're 100% convinced. I specially loved to chop and re-purpose different parts of a stamped image (like the tea plant or some of the laces) and see what they become in the final design. There is no right or wrong on how you arrange the items in the collage, so as long as you enjoy the playfulness of it, it's worth to spend the time.

That was all for today, thanks so much for spending your time in this maybe-too-long post, but I've been out for a while with my baby and all, and I may have come back too energetic on my typing and my sharing of pictures... I hope I didn't get you bored too much, hehe. See you around! And until the next one!

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