Create, Love, Joy. by Mark Gould

Good morning all and what an honour it is to be here as A Guest Designer for the Month of July amoung such talented artists.For those of you who do not know me I am Mark from Speshink

 To get the ball rolling I have A 9''x 9'' canvas, I knew I wanted to create a canvas and knew a few of the elements I wanted to include but was not sure what the finished project would look like. I don't know about you but most of the time I have a good idea of how things will look before I start out, this time round I just went with the flow.

 I started by stamping with black archival ink using the big ledger style stamp from the Numerical Plate A5 by Katy Fox straight onto the canvas,then I used some Decoart Gel Stain in Maple and painted that over the top in a random fashion and wiped it back, this is a translucent stain so the stamp shows through, the rest of the canvas was painted with Decoart acrylic paints, I used three shades of green and worked them into each other and over the edges of  the maple stain to form my base coat.

Again from the Numerical Plate Set I used the larger numbers and stamped the canvas with some embossing ink and covered with some Frantage embossing powder in an antique white and was really surprised at how well it worked.

 The next couple of stamps are from Neil Walkers range, Kiki and Franswar

 This is where the fun started, I broke out the melt pot and wax. Kiki was stamped onto some of the Tim Holtz Idea-ology tissue wrap terminology paper  again with archival ink and Franswar was stamped on to plain white tissue paper, both were positioned and covered with wax, the wax was sitting a little heavy and the paper could still be seen so it was given a blast with the heat gun, doing this gave the wax a chance to seep under and through the papers making them translucent and really brining out the stamped images.

 The words are from the Journaling Words II Set

and have been given the same treatment as Kiki and Franswar, I used archival again but Inspire was stamped with Coffee to tie in with the Gel Stain.

 More wax was added and pulled into place whilst being re heated with the heat gun to frame the characters. I highlighted the raised areas with some Treasure Gold in Topaz.

 You can just see the ledger style stamp and the tissue paper text through the Franswar image here.

 Whilst the melt pot was out I thought I would try out a new silicon mold with some black Wow embossing powder. As you can see the mold is an alphabet mold and the letters come out like scrabble tiles with the letter being raised.

After the powder had cooled I popped them out and used some of the Treasure Gold to hi light the letters and also a little around the edges, I am really pleased with how they came out, they have an old painted cast iron feel about them. I made enough for the words Joy and Love, they seemed to fit quite well with the other sentiments on the canvas.

In the final pic you can see how the letters are raised above the canvas. I used some pinflare to attach them.

 Thanks for stopping by, I will be back latter in the month with something new. xx