Shabby poppies

I'm not sure this is how I wanted this to look, but then again I don't know how I did want it to look, so perhaps IT IS how I wanted it to look! The main thing?  I'm thinking too hard!

So this is an A4 piece of card that had Sage paint slapped on and spread out with an old credit card. I then used some gel medium and a really manky brush to spread some thick lines of gel medium to give texture and resist.

 

Over this Hint of Mint.  I then added some book text with Gel Medium.  I let it dry a bit and then rip away sections that haven't stuck or partially stuck.  I also use my thumb nail to push and tip bits of the text to create tears and rips.

 

Added some more Hint of Mint and Sage to tone it all in and spritzed some Walnut Stain Distress Ink as well to give the "old look" effect. Added some stamping from the Hot Picks 1505 set.

Now the bottom half of this was an experiment.  Because poppies are such a strong image of war and remembrance I wanted some gravestones.  My library at work looks over St Mary's Church in Luton and right by the back of the library are some old gravestones.  so I went out early one morning took some snaps on my phone and then came back and manipulated them to create a long horizontal image.  I used the photocopy of the image to image transfer on to the background using gel medium.  You can't actually see the grave stones, but it added another layer  of texture and contrast colour.

Time for some stamping, I used Hot Picks 1505 to stamp the poppies in Sepia and then heat embossed Old Photo Distress powder.  The seed heads were stamped in Sepia and the stalk from the poppies added.  I did some colouring in with water colour pencils.

Then I used Art Basics clear crackle paste.  Never used this so wanted to see what I could achieve.  first layer too thin so added a second thicker layer.  Became impatient so started drying with heat gun and that gave the white bits on the right hand side (see below at the bottom of the photo over the poppy head).  So I went away and let it dry naturally. 

 Finally I added some white pencil, just scribbling here and there to add more texture, add shading  and lighten up some parts of the page. The crackle paste gave a grainy texture in places and if you look closely the white pencil has "coloured" the cracks. as well as the Walnut Stain I added. 

so as I said not sure it turned out how I was envisaging, but I think it still looks ok in a grungy shabby messy kind of way!

Hugs
Jo
xx