Inspiration deck - part three

Time to put part one and part two of the inspiration deck together:

remember these tissue papers I painted?

 

They peel off the freezer paper pretty easily.  There were a few little holes and tears in the paper, but not many, and I didn't care since I was using them for collage anyway.

 I tore off a chunk and used gel medium to glue the whole big piece over some cards.

(warning:  Jess has asked us not to use Mod Podge because she had big problems with a few decks last year.  Gel medium was my one extravagance in this project.)

 

 The tissue was still kind of wet and gluey when I pulled the cards off the freezer paper and separated them.  It made the tissue rip in interesting ways.

 

 Here's an example using a different tissue paper:

 

You can peel them off the freezer paper in a single sheet and trim them with scissors

 

After this, I wanted to explore other ways of creating texture and layers on my cards.

I tore little strips of newspaper:

Glued them on the sheet at random, overlapping multiple cards:

 I rolled on a light layer of gesso to tone it down a bit:

 I grabbed a homemade stamp (made from that same non-skid rubbery stuff) and rolled paint on it:

and stamped these little blue dots all over:

 the sheet of cards now looked like this:

I thinned some darker blue paint and some black paint with water:

then I started flinging the paint all over them by shaking the brush:

 Here they are with both blue and black drips before I cut them apart:

 

Now, I realize the paint flinging approach is not for everyone, so in consideration of those of you who don't have the space or inclination to get totally messy, I present an alternative way to add layers of paint:

 I buy these die-cut scrapbook papers from the big crafts stores and use them as stencils.  They're pretty cheap and hold up well to many uses:

 Here's what the cards looked like when I used gesso over the stencil:

 Here's what they looked like when I used blue paint over the stencil:

such different effects from the same stencil.  I love that.

 

Here's a sampling of the variety of backgrounds I created using these techniques.

All off the steps you've seen so far were done in a single (albeit long) evening of art making.

Stay tuned for part four in which I let the cards dry overnight and then add the text and finishing touches.