Encore - Vintage French Postcards

Hello all!  I have been creating new things, but they have specific publication deadlines, so while I'm heading into the busy period of technical rehearsals, dress and previews, here's a little Encore for you from way back when.  I created these projects with vintage printable images for the Sponsor Spotlight slot at the Our Creative Corner challenge blog back in November 2014.  Nicecrane Designs was one of our sponsors, and I designed both for the company and for the challenge design team.

Sadly neither Nicecrane Designs nor Our Creative Corner are up and running any longer, but that's no reason not to share this post with you.  During my time designing for Nicecrance, I worked with digi images fairly regularly, not something I really do much of in the general way of things.  This was one of those times, and here's what I wrote back then.

__________________________________

Hello everyone, it's Alison (butterfly) here with the second Sponsor Spotlight of the month, and we're turning that light on to Nicecrane Designs.

If you've never explored the huge range of printable images and collections available at Nicecrane Designs, it's high time you did!  If you're not a scrapbooker or card-maker, you may have thought printables weren't really up your street.  I hope to show you today that they can play a role in mixed media crafting too.  Here's just some of what I've been creating...

I was playing with the Vintage French Postcards - enchanting black and white designs with a delicious Parisian feel.

[2019 - I've had to delete the now non-existent image link here, but you can see the designs in the next photo anyway.]

I started very simply.  Once I'd downloaded the individual files, I put them all into a Word document and re-sized them to approximately ATC size, so that all six were on one page - almost exactly as the preview picture above shows them.  Then, rather than printing onto plain paper, I chose an A4 sheet from the Prima Cartographer pad and printed them directly onto that.

A bit of simple cutting and inking and I now have six great little cards/tags to insert into a scrapbooking layout or to include in a layered vintage-style card.  (The four on the right are inked already; the two on the left are still in a nice pristine state.)  Homemade ephemera in an instant!

Next, I picked my favourite of the images, the swallow, and copied and resized it on the second page of my document.  I wanted to try printing onto tissue paper so that I'd be able to use the image more flexibly in mixed media situations.  There are many tutorials for this on the internet, including several on youtube.  You can't put the tissue paper through by itself, so you have to attach it to a "carrier sheet" of stronger paper.  Some use spray glue, some use glue sticks.  I ended up using this method with double-sided tape - partly because I didn't have any temporary spray glue, but mainly because I could see she had the same printer as I have, so that encouraged me to hope I wouldn't kill the printer by doing it!  And it all went smoothly, I'm happy to say...

Once printed and trimmed free of the taped edges, I tore around the images.  If you have a torn edge rather than a sharp cut it's much more likely to "disappear" once you've glued/painted/spritzed around it.  My plan for the larger of the two images was to make a shabby chic style wooden hanging. I started by coating a wooden plaque with DecoArt Chalk Paint, mixing Rustic (basically brown!) and Relic (a dark grey) directly onto the wood.

The next layer was a coat of the American Decor Crackle Medium - specially formulated by DecoArt for their chalk paints - and then a topcoat of Everlasting (a.k.a. white!).  Once it had dried and crackled to my heart's content, I used Vintage Photo Distress Ink to warm-up the edges and give it that shabby age-stained look.

I applied multi-medium to the reverse of my tissue paper image (not to the plaque as the moisture would make the Distress Ink run) and smoothed it down onto the wood.  Once I'd made sure there were no wrinkles, I applied the multi-medium over the top too to seal it.

I love that you can clearly see the crackles through the image, giving the impression that the whole thing has weathered together over the years.

I did a little bit of extra inking over the top of the tissue...

... and added simple rustic twine to hang the plaque up by.

Next, a tag (of course!) which uses one of my patterned paper ephemera pieces as well as the tissue paper technique, this time over a different crackle medium.

For this one I started by applying DecoArt Crackle Paste to a large tag with a palette knife and leaving it to crackle.

Well, I say leaving it...  It got going with the crackling as it dried, but time started to press, and I decided to see if I could help things along with the heat gun in the places where I'd applied the paste more thickly.  Lots of crackle mediums don't like being hurried, and sure enough the crackle was a bit reluctant to play ball under the added heat.  However I did get this fabulous bubble effect instead - just as much fun!

Patience is a virtue, but impatience leads to happy accidents.

I gave the whole tag a wash of white paint, and then applied multi-medium to my medium-sized tissue paper bird in order to stick him over the crackly top half of the tag.

The much subtler texture where the paste was fairly thin gives a lovely porcelain crackle effect to the image.

Once it was all dry, I applied Vintage Photo Distress Ink with a blending tool to highlight all the different textures.

I selected the Parisian chair tag from my homemade ephemera...

... and a photo of Gloria Swanson downloaded from the internet and printed onto glossy photo paper...

... and set to work to do her justice with the embellishments.  I altered some paper roses using sprays made up from Luminarte Primary Elements powders in Hopeful Honeysuckle and Hot Cinnamon, as well as a spritz or two of Tattered Rose Distress Stain Spray.

I broke up the Prima wooden chequerboard embellishment and spritzed it with the same sprays to create a base for the flowers.  

And I used Ginger and Rust alcohol inks to tint the Word Band before smoothing on Antique Linen Distress Paint and wiping it back to leave the paint just in the lettering.

The Idea-ology Plaquette has had a drop or two of the same alcohol inks rubbed in to mute the bright white tone.

The Trellis Framework bits from another project have been sitting around for ages waiting to be used up.  They toned in perfectly with the palette here, and I added some flourish stamping around the edges to draw the eye inward towards that fabulous bubble texture!

And the seam binding at the top was gathered up from the tiny packages included when you order from The Funkie Junkie Boutique (last month's sponsor here).  They were all a very delicate pink, so I spritzed a couple of them with the Hot Cinnamon and Hopeful Honeysuckle, while leaving the others pale and pretty in between.

And I still have five more pieces of ephemera ready to use on future projects, including another version of that lovely swallow...

So there you have it - printables used in pretty much their simplest form, as well as with crackle mediums, paints and inks.  I hope they'll inspire you to check out some printable images (2019 edit - and there are plenty out there, even if Nicecrane is no more!).

_______________________________________

Not only printables but also pink... definitely a hop out of kin for me here!  But plenty of crackle and texture and that vintage vibe, so it still feels like home in some ways.  Thanks so much for stopping by today to enjoy this blast from the past, and keep your eyes peeled for some new creations coming your way very soon.  Have a great weekend, everyone!

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings...

William Shakespeare

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 busy.

As always, the Encore Posts are formatted differently from the regular ones, so that you can easily spot them.  Please don't feel that you have to comment all over again!

I won't send roses...

Hello everyone.  I'm so happy to be hosting the challenge at Our Creative Corner for April - I hope you'll find time to see the inspiration offered up by my fantastic team-mates, and to come and play along.  But just before we get into that, if you're looking for my Artistic Stamper challenge post from earlier today, just click on the link.  Sorry, the 1st of the month is always busy!

Back to Our Creative Corner - and this month I'm inviting you to do your creating "With A Song In Your Heart".  We'd like to see creations inspired by and including a song title and/or lyrics.  I'd like to see the words (either the title or some lyrics or both) appearing on your make, and you also need to let us know in your post the song which has inspired you.  In an ideal world it would be lovely if you included a link to the music, so we can listen while we look, but that bit's not compulsory!

I started with a song I've loved for years, but it took me by surprise, leading me to quite an unexpected place - pink, and very flowery!  And it ended up spreading onto not one but two jumbo size #12 tags, and into another mammoth post - sorry!!

And I don't really know if this counts - since clearly I was already making it at the same time, but evidently I was channelling Tim Holtz through the ether... have you seen his glorious April tag yet?!  So I'm going to enter these in the 12 Tags, even though they happened before I saw the tutorial!  Though I will have a play later in the month anyway... just for fun, and to learn more.

The song, I Won't Send Roses, is from the musical Mack and Mabel.  It's about two of the luminaries of the early cinema, Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, and in the song the hard-bitten, cynical, older Mack warns his young star Mabel not to fall for him since he's just not the romantic type, and it'll do her no good.

If you click on the name of the song, you can listen as you look.

There are versions with better sound quality, but with the link above you get the added bonus of the genius of ice dancers Torvill and Dean.

It's through them that I first discovered the song - initially in their brilliant Mack and Mabel routine in 1982 (still my favourite competitive routine, I think, over the much-lauded Bolero).









In the M&M routine, you hear just one refrain of Roses within the overture, but then Torvill and Dean used the whole song in a fabulous gala performance to close the 1984 Olympics... that's the one I've given you the song link for, just below the main photograph.  It still makes me cry, though I've watched it hundreds of times.  Utter perfection.








I think one of the things which appeals to me about this song - besides its soaring melody line which is just so beautiful - is the bitter sweet sentiment behind it.

It's built on an internal contradiction, and I love that kind of thing!










He tells her he won't send roses... and yet he can see that's what she deserves.  And unfortunately, she's already fallen for him big-time, so it's a bit late for a warning, and I think he knows that.  The push-pull of that gives their relationship and this song a brilliant dramatic tension.

He won't/can't show love, but somewhere deep down he does love her - though he may not even quite recognise it himself.  He just knows that she's beautiful with roses around her.

I won't send roses, and roses suit you so.

So clearly there had to be roses.  

But I also wanted a sense of bleakness, and a touch of decay, revealing the negative side.













Their relationship didn't have a happy ending in real life (or in the musical, strictly speaking), so there are hints of rust, and the spatter of tear drops shed.










Originally, I had everything on the one tag, but it got really crowded - despite the giant 10.5 x 5.125 inch size - especially with the whole line of the lyrics in one go.

(The background paper is by UHK Gallery, with some Pumice Stone stencilling through my new favourite stencil, TH's Latticework.)










Once the flowers were on top of the underlying structure, I could barely find anywhere to fit the rusted washers which had been a major part of the original swirl of ideas!

It was all just too busy... plus I really didn't want to cover up those bare branches and trellises too much - I really liked them!










Breakthrough time came when I realised that I could just shift the roses across to create a whole
other contrasting tag, reflecting that turnaround in the thought in the lyrics.










I had a lovely time playing with the Trellis Frameworks die: the empty frame for those non-existent roses in the first tag...












... and a rusted hint of it underlying the longed-for rose bower in the second.

I created the rusted pieces of trellis with various embossing powders and paints on some thick card, and the wooden branches are actually wooden, altered with some gesso and paint.













I found I needed to add some colour to the very wintry neutrals so that the two tags looked as though they belonged together more.  

I thought some of my glass pebbles would be a great start, this time with a pinky-red spritzed book page underneath, rather than my usual greeny-blue ones!

All the splattering came later.








The two book page butterflies were late additions - beautiful creatures which arrived, ready-distressed, with an order from my fabulous team-mate Linda, a.k.a. the Funkie Junkie.










They seemed to perch perfectly on the wooden branches, adding some dimension to match those huge flowers across the way.

And you'll see there are plenty of my rusted washers, now fully visible in all their decaying glory.









For the roses, I gathered up some of the many paper flowers I seem to have accumulated, despite only rarely using them on projects.

Clearly there's a deep attraction on some level, which I find hard to admit even to myself...

What, me?  Girly flowers?  And pink?  Really?!  (Hello, Mack Sennett - here's part of why I understand your levels of self-deception!)











I used lots of gesso and spritzing on them (mainly using the sprays I made up with Luminarte Primary Elements powders, though there are some 13 Arts ones in there too).

Some flowers started out a darker colour, rather than white or cream, so they took the inks differently.










I love the colour variation that gives across the whole bouquet.

And of course some of them got left as cream or ivory - until the spattering, that is!










There are more of the glass beads nestled in amongst the flowers here - again, a way to tie the two tags together.

The woman from the Tim Holtz Classics #5 set is a regular feature here at Words and Pictures.

There's something infinitely flexible about her expression, so she can be sad and cold one moment and warm and content the next, depending on what you feed into her eyes with your own thoughts.









There's a little more rust creeping in at the top, with some rusty wire twined around the feminine softness of the ribbons, as Mack is already twined around Mabel's heart.

So that's the journey this song took me on.  I hope you enjoyed it.

Regulars at Words and Pictures will know that my creations are quite often triggered by songs (Write a little more often or the recent You Don't Bring Me Flowers for instance), so this is a very natural way to work for me.




I know, however, that it posed a real challenge to some of my team-mates, but they stepped bravely and brilliantly out of their comfort zones - and I absolutely love what they've created as a result.  Do check out their beautiful projects, along with all the challenge rules and details, here at Our Creative Corner and I hope you'll be inspired to play With a Song in Your Heart - you might surprise yourself!

And don't forget there's a new Artistic Stamper challenge kicking off today too!

Words make you think.  Music makes you feel.  A song makes you feel a thought.
Yip Harburg (song lyricist who wrote, amongst many many others, the lyrics for Somewhere Over the Rainbow, not to mention the rest of the songs in The Wizard of Oz, and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime)

I'd like to enter these as my April tags in Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2014.  I know it's cheeky - but I just can't believe the coincidence - so it's irresistible, I'm afraid!
And at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge it's The One With All The Rules a.k.a. Anything Goes.