An affirmation for myself and mini tutorial (Pic heavy)

Hello everybody,

First of all a million thanks for your comments and feedback here and on facebook. I am truly grateful for all of you who take the time out to comment and encourage.

Today's project is entirely for myself and I have been meaning to do it for the longest time. I am a big scaredy-cat and have long periods of self doubt and often question my capabilities ,so I decided that I needed something to motivate me and reaffirm the faith I should have in myself ( heavy stuff,heh heh ).This is why I made this.

You might not know that even though most of my projects are in the shabby chic, overly embellished style, my first love is mixed media and I have a fascination for textures. I am not a painter and not very good at sketching, so mixed media gives me the opportunity of playing with paints and mediums.

As I had mentioned in my last post, today I have a tutorial for you. I don't know how many of you who read this blog, actually like mixed media, so I am kind of nervous about sharing the tutorial. Then again, my project today is a sort of positive affirmation for myself, so I figured to just go ahead and share it anyway.

Enough rambling and on to the tutorial.

Here is how I altered them.(Apologies for the not so great pictures. It was very late at night and my craft space does not have enough light)

Step 1 : The first step I always follow before painting any object, especially wood, is to prime it with Gesso. Gesso provides some tooth to the surface for the paint to stick on to and you also end up using less paint, since it does not get absorbed by your substrate.

Step 2: I tore out some pattern paper sheets and stuck them down randomly on the letters .I used Matt medium, but you can use glue or mod podge or watered down PVA glue. Remember, random is key. There's no plan or precision required. This should be fun and not a practice in being a perfectionist. (What a relief for all you cardmakers, eh )

Step 3. I wanted colour on my pieces but I also wanted the black and white designs to show through, so I took some stencils and sprayed randomly through them. Not too much, just a teeny bit to add shades of blue .

Step 4.I also used some stencils to add some texture using modelling paste. If you do not have modelling paste, you can use a thick layer of gesso or just use acrylic paint through the stencils. It's all about playing and experimenting, so make do with what you have.

Step 5. The last step I did was just pick up some red and yellow acrylic paints with my fingers and dab them randomly all over the letters. At some places, I focused on the stencilled areas to highlight them. Like I said, totally random. If you don't like what you did ,use a baby wipe to rub off the colour. If you do it quickly enough, you can get rid of the paint.

My next step is generally stamping, but in this case since the base layer has touches of black in it, I didn't bother to do it. I did go in with bubble wrap and some Gesso and stamped with it to tone down some of the very bright areas which were bothering me.
 
The last step was to sand the edges , distress all the sides of the letters with black ink and seal it with Matte medium. You can use mod-podge or watered down PVA glue.

And that's it. You are done.

Phew, that was a long post. I hope you had the patience to read all of it. I would love to know if you found this helpful or does it look like just a random hodge podge of paint and mess to you.:-).It's difficult to be objective with your own projects, isn't it?

Cheers
Pallavi

 

Submitting for
Color Conceptions Challenge # 10-Anything but cards
Altered Eclectics April challenge