Roses on a brick wall

Well I said there would be more roses (I know I said it ages ago, but better late than never) and here they are! 

I started off with a small canvas that had PaperArtsy Chartreuse (from the Lin Brown Limited Edition) paint all over. I then stamped some tissue paper with one of my favourite PaperArtsy collage stamps (I basically love all the Ink & the Dog collections and often leave them uncut to use as a whole plate in this way) in a green ink.  Painted the back of the tissue paper in chartreuse and glued this on and ripped away (see top right, a happy mistake as it wrinkled and tore as I was gluing, so just helped it a bit more!) in places and scrunched it up a bit in places as well. 

Over this I added a thin layer of Grunge Paste, not neat and certainly not smooth!

Once this was dry I added more Grunge Paste through the bricks stencil and left to dry.

Now for the painting. 

Lots of light layers to get the look of aged bricks using the Seaweed, Chutney and Tikka paints.  I really wanted the keep the definition of the bricks, so I used quite a dry brush technique (squirt a blob of paint on your craft sheet, add paint to to your brush, work it in a bit by dabbing on your craft mat and then wiping of the excess on kitchen roll) and basically dabbed the paint on. 

I jut kept adding layers seeing what gave the best look and used a little bit of Little Black dress to touch the edges of the bricks as well. 

I also added a bit of Tikka around the edges of the canvas to edge it and give that look of staining you often see on walls.

The roses were made in the same way as the blue roses from my last PaperArtsy post (ok I'll be honest they were spare ones left over!) and I added a Lin Brown sentiment on a scrap of linen in plum ink and some Vintage Photo Distress ink on it to, well - distress!.

I have to say this includes some of my favourite techniques to make shabby distressed art and I'd quite like to replicate the tissue paper and brick stencilling on a much larger canvas with a whole bunch of trailing leaves and flowers or use as a background for some of flower photographs, and I could image transfer them ...

Arggh, to many ideas not enough time!

hugs
jo
xx