Encore - Time to Bloom

Encore Posts

Projects which made their first appearances elsewhere for Design Team duties or Guest Designer opportunities, but which only had a sneak peek here, are being gathered together in the pages of my virtual scrapbook while I'm away.  Please don't feel that you have to comment all over again!

Hello!  Just another quick encore before you get something new on Monday - and I think Monday's project may take you by surprise!  But for now, here's a large canvas created as a Sponsor Spotlight for Our Creative Corner when I was on the team there.  This was to showcase our sponsor for that particular month, Tando Creative - so there are lots of their fabulous chipboard pieces involved.  Here's what I wrote back in April 2014.

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Hello all!  I've got a 12 x 12 canvas for you today...

... with lots of texture in the background, and lots of crackle...

... and dimension and words aplenty.

I started by coating the largest of the Tando clocks with Croco Crackling Colour by Viva Decor.

My crackling medium is actually white, so once it was all dry and crackled I applied Distress Stains in lots of colours from nature... starting with earthy browns at the bottom, working up through the leafy, grassy greens, to blue skies at the top.

I spritzed with water as I went to allow the colours to mix and blend on the surface.

I made sure I had the clock hands approximately in position (I generally go with ten to three - "And is there honey still for tea?") so that I could see where the colours needed to go, and gave them the same treatment.

They're fastened together with one of the Prima industrial effect brads.

I'd originally been thinking of creating some sort of hanging mobile but, when push came to shove, 
I realised it would be tricky to get the hands in the right place and so on.
So instead, I decided to mount the clock on a 12 x 12 canvas.  (That should tell you how big the largest clock is!)
You can see an early draft here... the untreated clock and flowers, with a plan to "hang" the clock on a "tree"!

In the end, rather than the tree bark paper, I used a piece of 7 Dots Studio paper from their 9th Wave collection as my background.  It already looked pretty good just as it was, but I decided to augment it with some actual texture.

I added pieces of lace and cheesecloth, and glued them down with multi-medium.

And I applied some texture paste through the Tim Holtz doily stencil in various places.

Once all that was dry, I applied gesso fairly roughly here and there...

... and then set to with some spritzing and spraying and inking.

I used partly Distress Stains which I'd put into misters (ED: before the days of Distress Sprays!)...

... and various other sprays including Dylusions, Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists, and Ayeeda sprays from 13Arts.

I sprayed and dabbed and knocked back and sprayed again until I was happy that my added texture looked as though it was an organic part of the paper.

I glued the whole thing down to the canvas and gave the edges a good roughing up for texture and dimension.

Next it was time for the flowers...

Having created such a busy background, I decided the flowers themselves needed to be relatively simple and neutral.

I stamped the lovely SheArt Print Texture (by Christy Tomlinson, Unity stamps) in Coffee Archival...

... and did a little light inking around the edges, and then arranged the stems around the clock face, trying to make sure they balanced nicely.

The words arose out of the two Tando products in use - clocks and flowers... time to bloom, then.

They're stamped with my Hero Arts Playful Flowers letters...

... and inked and mounted on padded tape over the textured background.

The final step was to add some musical tissue tape around the edges of the canvas.  Never neglect the edges!

And I used the Distress Stains here too to tint the tape slightly to blend in with the main surface of the canvas.

So that's my Tando Creative Canvas for you.  I hope you like it.

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It's funny how some projects have stayed very familiar and immediate to me, and others I'd almost completely forgotten about.  This was one of the latter sort, so it's great to have it gathered in to the fold here at Words and Pictures finally... Now I might even remember its existence!

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and, as I said, I promise there'll be something new for you on Monday.

As long as we are persistent in our pursuit of our deepest destiny, we will continue to grow.  We cannot choose the day or time when we will fully bloom.  It happens in its own time.
Dennis Waitley