My sweet friend Teia recently sent me some black/silver patterned paper to use on my craft ventures.
I got this pack of paper... looked at it, puzzled... and wondering what to do with these beautiful patterns. Black/grey/silver are not colours I would normally use... in anything but clothes.
Wanting to complete challenge nr. 2 - not using my favourite colour combination including Turquoise -
I had to find a way to use these papers. Thinking, thinking... cup of coffee, more thinking,... nothing. I gave it up for the day and went on to do some other stuff, such as scraping a canvas back to almost the bare basics. Previously it had undergone several transformations. None of which I liked.
Here's the creative process in various steps....
But although I was mildly pleased with the last version... I just did not "feel" the love for it... so on we went: I scraped it down until nothing more would budge. Gel medium is a powerful thing!
Frustrated, I chucked it all in the corner of the craft table and sat down with my soulmate to watch "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events". The movie, beautifully filmed, wonderful colours. As the Baudelair children enter Count Olaf's house.. the darkened lime green walls against the black pilars and doors struck me... THAT was a colour combination I could work with :) It is a strange thing when inspiration hits you!
I gessoed the bare-ish canvas and painted it a mixture of lime green and naples yellow. I stenciled some flowery leaves on it, dded some texture paste through another stencil.and cut a strip of the black paper with a swirly pattern. Et voila... phase 1. Now what?
I did not like the big swirls and decided to replace the strip with another of the black patterns. I started pulling the paper off but the bottom layer which had been glued onto the base stuck... and had a different pattern with small flowers on it.
The distressed look was actually quite interesting so I decided to keep that.
A very heavy background like this would need some simple additions... a black and white picture maybe? A bit of searching threw up this really funny picture and the rest came by itself...
No turqoise to be seen :) mission completed.
If you like my musings, drop me a line. I would love to hear from you! Chris
xxx