Hello, my post today is a card that I made a while ago. It combines two things that I love, card making and Tole Painting. Before I became a card maker, I spent my free time painting on wood. I learned how to float color with a flat brush to add shadows and highlights. I was pleased when I tried the same techniques on paper and found that it worked just as well!! For this card, I used a pansy stamp from Stacy Stamps. Scroll down on this page and you will find it. It is sold with a pansy corner stamp. The flower is painted with Americana acrylic paint. You can get it at Micheal's. The finished effect has a matte, chalk like finish. Here is my card.
If you've done Tole Painting, this will be easy for you to understand but I'll try to explain it so that even those of you who have never done it might be able to give it a try. First stamp the flower in a light color a little darker than the color you've decided to paint the flower. Next base coat the flower by wetting your brush and then picking up some paint. The water will help the paint to flow over the card stock and will make it a bit more transparent so the stamped lines will show through. Next put in the shadows. You will need a flat brush, I used a 10 flat. Side load the brush with a darker pink. You can see how to side load your brush and how to float the paint here. You will need to put shadows behind the two middle petals and then on both sides of the petal that lays on top of them. I also put a little shadow on the outside edge of the petal that is behind all the others. The arrows in the picture below show where the shadows go.
Next you do the same thing with white paint to add the highlights. Side load your flat brush with white and float highlights on the top edges of the middle two petals and all around the petal that lays on top of the others.
After the shading and highlighting are completed and dried, take some purple paint and add water to it until you get an inky consistency. Use a liner brush to make the thin lines that form the colorful center of the pansy. The final step is to paint in the center of the flower with a butterscotch color and float on a little brown to make it look rounded. Here is a close-up of the flower.
This technique is a lot quicker than you would think and it is really pretty when it's done. I've used lots of colors and they all look great!
Thanks for visiting,
Janet
My friend, Mary, told me about some portraits she'd seen that were painted with espresso! She said they were striking and looked like sepia photos!! She knows me and knew that I'd be challenged to give it a try! Thanks, Mary!! The most difficult part was brewing the coffee so I could get lots of different shades of brown to use. I drink very weak coffee so the palest shade was easy. The darker shades were much harder to achieve. I felt like a mad scientist brewing espresso double strength multiple times, but that gave me the medium color, then I took some of that and added a few spoonfuls of instant coffee to get the darkest color. Once I had the medium and dark color, I added some water to each to get shades in between. Altogether I had 5 colors to paint with ranging from dark to light!
When I started painting, I was hooked! The coffee behaved exactly like other watercolors and smelled delicious!! I enjoyed it so much that I didn't want to stop so I have 3 cards to share with you. On the first one, I used a flower from Tim Holtz Flower Garden stamp set.
After I finished painting with the coffee, I masked the flowers and added some interest to the background with stencils from My Favorite Things and Tim Holtz. I used Distress ink and a blending tool for this. The swirl at the top is from a Stampin' Up set called Baroque Motifs and the sentiment and "beautiful" die are from Concord & 9th.
I wanted to see how coffee painting would look on a more whimsical image, so I painted one of the cute little boy stamps from Lilli of the Valley. I was very pleased with how it came out! The browns fit perfectly with the old-timey look of the image!
For the extras on this card I used MFT's double stitched rectangle STAX and Picket Fence dies
On the last card I have to show you, I embossed Altenew's Persian Motif stamps with white embossing powder. I was worried that the coffee might stain the white embossing, but it didn't. I liked the simplicity of this card and thought it would make a good sympathy card.
The frame around the sentiment on this card is from MFT. It is called Stitched Rectangle Scallop Frames and the sentiment is part of Hero Arts Prayers stamps and die set.
This was a really fun experiment. I hope you enjoyed looking and that maybe you might give painting with coffee/espresso a try! Thanks so much for visiting!
Janet
This is the card that I made for Christmas this year. This polar bear makes me laugh and it's fun to dress him in different sweaters! I like using acetate and it gave this card a 3-D look that I really like. I used white acrylic paint to put dots on the acetate and on the dark blue card on the back. There is about an inch between the two pieces that give this card a lot of depth and makes it look like the funny bear is standing outside in the snow!
It was tricky to take a photo that showed the 3-D effect. I hope you can see it in this one!
I wanted the cocoa cup to be popped out so I stamped his hands, cut them out and then glued them on with a piece of foam tape behind the cup so it could be rounded.
Here's a close up...
Supplies Used:
Cardstock: Cougar Opaque white, SU Night of Navy, acetate
Stamps: My Favorite Things - Cool Day, Stampin' Up - Festival of Trees, Purple Onion - Joy to the World
Inks: Momento-Tuxedo Black, Stampin' Up-Handsome Hunter
Copics: sorry, I forgot to write them down
Miscellaneous: White acrylic paint, glitter, foam tape, pink chalk
I'm glad you took the time to visit!
Janet
