Monday 31 July 2017

Kitchen Towel Background



I needed a quick project for today's post, so I decided to follow the advice of another crafter that I greatly admire and who blogs every day; 'Go with what you've got and don't think it has to be perfect.'  So thanks, Barbara Gray, I love how this tag turned out and I still have the top layer of the paper towel to work with.
I had a look through my stash of mop up sheets and came across a piece of paper towel which I had used to clean my brayer when working on the last project of the two day Clarity retreat.  I had consciously put it to one side at the time to keep as I loved the colours so much.  I am not entirely sure of all the colours that I had used; they are all Artistry inks and I seem to remember Earth Song and Fall Fiesta as two of them.
Once I had split the layers of the paper towel and laid a #8 manilla tag underneath, I decided to work with the bottom layer of paper towel and keep the more vibrant panel for another project.
I glued the paper towel down with Distress collage medium then sealed over the top and tore away the edges.  Once completely dried with a heat tool I used a large file from the Basic Gray precision file set to neaten the edges (as if I were using proper decoupage paper).
I wanted to keep the tag simple and stamped the largest of the geese stamps from the set by Claritystamp using Jet Black Archival ink over the centre of the tag.
As I thought I had sealed the paper towel, I used my Faber-Castell Big Brush markers in Warm Grey III and IV to colour the birds with Dark Chrome Yellow for the legs, feet and beaks.  As you can see, I obviously hadn't done a great job of sealing the top layer as some of the colour bled and some of it went rather blotchy.  However as the background is similar, it just adds to the effect.
Finally, I added some Spectrum Noir pencil shading around and under feet and below the bodies of the geese and blended everything out with a paper stump and some blending solution.

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