2023 Topic 11: Monochrome {by Liesbeth Fidder de Vos } with Blue & Lynne Perrella stamps

Hi everyone! It's Liesbeth here with you today.

I was looking forward for this Monochrome topic for a long time! And to show you how nice it can be if you have only one colour as your starting point! So I chose a beautiful blue, wonderful stamps, took my A4 art journal and made this spread.

For most of the things I make I don't have a plan, I just start. But not this time :-) . I new some things in advance: Japanese, blue, and the small mosaic tiles. (Something I did before, loved it!) I decided the rest and the process  while I created this journal spread and after much deliberation, and lots of fun, it turned out to this. I am happy with the result, hope it inspires you too!

Inspired by Japanese porcelain and our own Dutch Delft Blue I chose two of the wonderful Japanese stamp sets by Lynne Perrella: PaperArtsy LPC023 and LPC024. Oh how I love them! Some of them have that beautiful Japanese characters, that will work perfect for our quarter theme: Typography!

For creating the tiny tiles I needed some PaperArtsy Grunge Paste. It's chalky and creamy, the perfect one for my tiles!

My favourite PaperArtsy Fresco Paint is Glass Blue, so that choice was easy, I use it a lot! I love the blue colour and its transparency so much!

Besides the blue I also used black and white: PaperArtsy Fresco paints Little Black Dress and Snowflake. I always like to make a color study in advance so that I know what to expect. So I mixed the colours onto the colour wheel, except between black and white because I knew I didn`t want to use any grey. I was surprised about the mix Glass Blue and black! Amazing ,indigo' blue!

I took my art journal, protected the other pages with some paper under my spread, and started! The paper in my journal is a nice watercolour paper, very good for the background I had in mind. But it's very bumpy, so hard to stamp on. 

I tried to make a cloudy background: I used a drop of PaperArtsy Fresco paint Glass Blue and a lot of water, it looked like watercolour paint, great! I just painted the entire journal spread with a soft brush, worked very wet.

Here and there I splashed some paint drops and dabbed dark areas with a paper towel to make it cloudy.

After drying I was temperate satisfied about the result, it was beautiful, but a bit to soft...boring. So I thought: It needs some more interest, why shouldn't I start with some ,tiles'?

Using the Glass Blue paint, the crackle part of PaperArtsy Stencil PS105 and a small sponge I sponged the crackle. Dark at the edges (a few layers) and softer in the middle of the spread. Nice effect! This is what it needed!

 

Time for the focal points of the pages! I stamped all of the stamps from the PaperArtsy stamp sets  LPC023 and LPC024 onto an A4 piece of smooth white cardstock with a waterproof black ink. (I used Tsukineko StazOn-Jet Black) Then I used the blue PaperArtsy Fresco paint  Glass Blue as a water coulor paint again. Using lots of water and a bit of paint I painted the stamped images. I tried to vary light and dark.

When everything was painted, I cut them out and made a composition. The idea was to create a ,group' of stamped images on each page, which I was going to connect with mosaic. Here you see the left page. I was satisfied about it and I glued it onto the page

There was a little problem with the right page. The stamp with the face and flagpole with the fishes was to hard to cut uit, so I needed to stamp the flagpole directly onto the page as you see here, and add the cut out face and fishes later on. Because the paper is very bumpy, the stamped image was not very neat, so I drew over it with a black fineliner.

And this was the result of the right page after gluing the stamped images down. I also sponged the edges of the pages with some black ink.

I was happy with the way my pages looked at this stage, now I just wanted to connect them!

Now the stamping part was done, it was time for the tiny tiles. It takes time, but I think the result is worth it and it is so much fun! Al you need is a little patience.

First I spread out a very thin layer (1 à 2 mm) of PaperArtsy Grunge Paste onto a craft sheet. I always use a rubber spatula for this. I let this slice dry for one or two days. A long drying time is good to let it harden well.

Then I broke the dried Grunge Paste into small pieces, different in shape.

I painted the biggest part of my mosaic tiles with PaperArtsy Fresco Paint Glass Blue, my main colour. The reason why I break into pieces first and then paint is I want to colour the sides as well! Because the paint is translucent, it needs two layers of paint.

I also painted a few tiles white (PaperArtsy Fresco paint Snowflake). The 3rd colour I painted some tiles with was a beautiful indigo blue, I mixed it with Glass Bue and black (PaperArtsy Fresco paint Little Black Dress) I think on my colour wheel it was something between 3 and 4 :-) I let the small pieces dry very well. Overnight works best.

Now we're going to create a nice tiled connection! 

Starting in the bottom left corner, I glued the tiles onto the pages one by one, around the stamped images. Most of them Glass Blue, here and there white or the mixed dark blue. Here you can see what I mean.... hopefully it makes sense;-)

And so on for the middle part... I tried to make a track, a kind of path in one flowing movement.

 

The finished right page

And here you see the finished spread again.

This was so much fun to do! I think the journal spread has turned out mostly the way I had in mind before! I learned that working with monochrome colours, which I almost never do, isn't boring at all! It was an adventure and I love the way the colours turned out. Perfect together with black and white! The combination of the three used PaperArtsy Fresco paints  Little Black Dress, Snowfake and a main role for Glass Blue was great. Making and glueing the mosaic tiles was hours of work, but worth it! They work so good in combination with the stunning Lynne Perrella stamp sets LPC023 and LPC024 !! I hope I inspired you to choose only one colour of Fresco paint (ok...and black&white :-) ) and give it a try! Have fun!

Liesbeth XX

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2017 #13 Pearlescent: Mosaic Frame with LPC {by Ruth Mescall}

2017 Topic 15: Pearlescent

Ruth shows you 3 ways with infusions AND how to make stunning pearly tiles in this post! Somehow she gets it all to work perfectly together - I can't help but wonder how long it took her to commit to arranging the tiles in such a perfectly random way!

Hi everyone, it's Ruth here from 'a love to create' and today I'd like to share with you a frame I've made using a faux mother of pearl technique...yes I've been experimenting again!

When I was looking at picture inspiration for this topic, I came across some mother of pearl mosaic square tiles and thought I wonder if you could create something like that with paint effects, Pearl glaze and something else to create depth? I wasn't sure at that stage whether the squares would be part of a background interspersed with lovely Lynne Perrella images or  a mosaic frame  around one bold image...or even how I would stamp the images, all I knew was that it was time to start experimenting. 

I thought there would be quite a lot of trial and error as that's what usually happens but it came together fairly easily.  I think smaller squares would be even more effective and would allow for different sized images to be used but on this occasion I used a large detailed image for the frame from this stamp set: 

Lynne Perrella Set 009.

Having looked at the tile photo and using shells as another reference I created the first layer, roughly blending lots of paints on Heavy weight smoothy card with cut and dry foam. The paints I used were Taupe, Vanilla, Nougat, Caramel, Snowflake, Concrete, Stone, Pewter (for the back board) and Pearl glaze.

So my idea was to mix Pearl Glaze with 3D transparent gloss gel approx 1:3 ratio. I spread it on with a palette knife and textured them all a little differently with simple tools. I thought I may have applied it too thickly but I was so pleased when they dried as it left a lovely soft  pearly, slightly milky glaze and  exactly what I'd hope for.

Now for the main image, I chose to stamp with Golden Sands infusions. Use Versamark, rub in the infusions and spritz with water. You get  such a variety of images with second and third impressions. The one on the far left more closely matched the colours of the tiles so I used that one and decided to seal it with a wax glaze similar to Distress micro glaze. 

I thought I'd also share the central image from the above photo which is surprisingly detailed, this is using the same method but after lightly spritzing with water I waited a minute before stamping and this is the result. In case you haven't guessed I do like experimenting with infusions and will be using this one as the main image on a card. 

Next bit is easy peasy, 1inch/2.5cm squares just glued and mounted but what about using a steel rule die and creating hexagons or other patterns? All the rough blips that happened when spreading out the gel just add to the mother of pearl effect.

Lastly I just needed to add the main image 'tile' and grout it in place. I had tried a painted gold surround at first but grunge paste was perfect and once dry a little pearl glaze was all that was needed. 

I really hope you can see the subtle sheen and different tones depending on how the light hits the frame and I think this effect would look lovely on a box maybe surrounding a stamped cameo. Are you inspired to create some mother of pearl? ...I hope so. Ruth x

Blog: 'a love to create'
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I am amazed at how much colour still pops through the pearly layer you put on top of the painted backgrounds! The tiles look fabulous and the 3 images each have their own appeal too. It's hard to imagine you ever have experiments that don't work! ~Leandra

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