I've been reading some stress management self help books recently to try and get some hints and tips on how to manage my time and workload and still enjoy life. One of the hints was to use your senses to distract you, to focus on something more calming, I suppose to find your happy place.
Making, seeing and touching art is one of my happy places, as is making and eating food and the quiet of early morning with just the birdsong.
Recently I've been using fabric and stitching again in my art along with texture paste, in this case Grunge Paste. To create different layers and textures, smooth and rough, light and shade (there is probably some art therapy tick box I've just ticked there in that sentence in terms of the frenzied state of mind).
I love the fact that texture / grunge paste is so smooth and silky looking in the tub, yet when you apply to something you can really rough it up to create a completely different look. As I said in a tweet a couple of weeks ago I wasn't aiming to pass smooth icing class 101!
I wanted to see if you could use embossing powder on dried texture / grunge paste to highlight the roughness so you could see the texture more, to pick out the lines I'd created with my palette knife . It did and I also got the addition of a molten glass like look as well where there were large areas of embossing powder.
I really like what I've created here, it is such a tactile piece. I love the neutral brown base layer (Chocolate Pudding and French Roast and a smidge of Squid Ink in the corners) over the texture paste but I love even more the coppery tones created by the gold stitching, embossing powder, paint and twisted wire.
What I really want to do now is work on a much bigger canvas to create similar kinds of work in different colour schemes, um how big can I go?
Right another happy place for this morning - rugby. It's the Lions Second Test, it could be noisy!
hugs
jo
xx
It's been a while I know.
I made this "recently" some time in May (see I can't actually be sure when I did make start it or indeed finish it) and I've been meaning to show it all week, but ...
Anyhow, what did I do?
Well the base is mount board that has loads of layers of Paper Artsy Fresco paints in Butternut, Pumpkin Soup, Haystack and Old Gold. You know the drill, add paint, wipe off, dry, add paint, wipe off, dry and repeat.
I then added some text stamping using Monarch Orange Archival. The lovely medallion from Lynne Perrella 004 was stamped in Archival Blue Violet. I love this colour for background stamping, it's dark but not too dark.
Over this were layers of Smoked Paprika and Autumn Fire. these make the background stamping fade nicely so sometimes there is just a hint, just a shadow of an image. and then on top of this layer I stamped the postage stamp from Lynne Perrella 009 in Blue Violet in a grid pattern, some of the images are the second and third stamp to continue the faded look.
For the pale lady I carefully painted a page torn from an old Brewers Phrase and Fable* bought from a junk shop with Smoked Paprika. I then painted just the face from the beautiful large collage stamp from the Lynne Perrella 009 plate with Snowflake stamped this on the page, quickly cleaned the stamp and then added more layers of snowflake on the page to create a pale background for when I stamped the image again in Black Versamark. The edges of the page were torn and she was glued on using PaperArtsy Satin Gloss.
When it was dry I added some Treasure Gold in Renaissance, Ruby and Florentine around the edge of the stamped image. I also flicked some watered down Old Gold to give some splats.
In the corners of the mount board I sprinkled on some Fran-tage Aged Spice Embossing Enamel and melted it to give more texture. The edges then had more Treasure Gold on them to frame it.
This took me quite a while and there were a few mishaps and versions on the way with the pale lady but I got where I wanted to be and the journey was good!
Hugs
jo
*Brewers (as it's know in the trade) if you haven't heard of it is a reference work that is packed with definitions and explanations of
many famous phrases, allusions and figures - pick a page at random and learn loads of stuff both useful and useless.
.
I wanted to see if you could use embossing powder on dried texture / grunge paste to highlight the roughness so you could see the texture more, to pick out the lines I'd created with my palette knife . It did and I also got the addition of a molten glass like look as well where there were large areas of embossing powder. 
