Altered Art: The Key to Creativity

Creativity Key

One of my Tuesday night regulars, Hilary, brought amongst a whole stash of other things two sets of greyboard keys and fobs. ‘Can you think of anything you can do with these?’, she asked. This is what I came up and finished this morning.

The key is textured with sand texture paste, and then layered with fluid acrylics following Andy Skinner’s industrial paint recipe I learnt last year. The tag was sealed with black gesso. I cut a smaller oval and painted that gold, and two layers of black card were cut on the Silhouette Cameo and layered together before the top layer was dampened and hammered loudly and long to create the texture. Once everything was dry, it was all glued together and two coats of thick gloss spray varnish completed the look. I’m impressed with the triple thick glaze spray – it really helps the hammered card look more like a hammered metal enamel finish.

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Art Journal Page: Nature

Nature

In between planting out onion sets, garlic and shallots at the allotment, teaching scrapbook layouts, supervising a learner crocheting and making tea for the landscape gardeners, I slipped in an art journal page! It just goes to show that if you aim to do a page a day – you can. Just! I wanted to try my inverse silhouette technique with something other than black ink, and I think it worked really well 🙂

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Art Journal Page: Aging

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I wanted to get some practice with some crackle medium, so I got out the DecoArt Americana Weathered Wood and applied it over a black gesso ground. Once that had dried, I added acrylic paint and gesso over the top, dry brushing one into another. Once the cracking had finished, I blended the colours a little more using some of the pink on a wet wipe and moving it up into the white. I dried that and then sealed the crackle with DecoArt Ultra Matte Varnish. Then out came the Pitt Artist Pens for the knots, board joins and the text, all of which were sanded back slightly to age. The quote, by the way, was chosen once I’d done the cracked paint – I thought it was quite apt 🙂

 

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