Glittery book

I made this book for a swap with the theme of 'glitter'.  I wanted to use glitter in a subtle way, rather than in an 'in-your-face' way.

I created the book by tearing 5 sheets of watercolour paper for the inside, and a slightly larger sheet for the cover. I painted the cover with a mixture of matte medium, turquoise, jenkins green and titan buff fluid acrylic paints and dabbed a crumpled piece of paper on it to add texture.

Once the paint was dry, I used a Basic Grey laser cut 'doily' as a stencil, and dabbed on Stewart Gill Metamica paints in 'brass' and 'verdigris'.  Once dry, I added glitter  by dabbing on 3 colours of Stickles, and spreading it around with my finger. It doesn't show that well on this photo, but you can see more of it on the second photo.

To finish the book off, I did a very simple binding using some tubular variegated embroidery thread, and a polymer clay. The pear was made by rolling Premo Accents clay until thin, creating texture using a rubber stamp, and baking until cured. This is the first time I've used Premo Accents and I was very disappointed because the gold isn't shiny, it's very matte.  And I needed shiny. Very shiny. So, after a generous application of Treasure Gold, my pear is beautifully shiny!

Metal ATCs

For this swap, I needed to make 3 ATCs which featured metal. 

I decided to use metal tape, but to add image and texture by putting peel offs onto the card bases before applying the metal tape.  I also used Dyna tape labels for the words.

This is the first stage:

This is the next stage:

The first ATC is coloured with alcohol inks - butterscotch and lettuce with a touch of pesto.  I applied them all separately, but they pretty much mingled into one colour.  I added some more to mottle them, but it just blended, so I took the hint and left them alone!

The second ATC - 'oak' - was painted with several colours and coats of Pebeo glass paint, sanded with a fine sanding block, then overstamped with a tiny oak leaf in Brilliance Coffeebean ink. I wasn't thrilled with the outcome so put it to one side for a while.

I added some alcohol inks and felt it had improved.

The distressed damsel was also peel offs under metal tape, but this time I added a second layer of metal tape, and trapped a chipboard frame and image between the layers. I then painted the metal tape with Stewart Gill Byzantium paints, then sanded it down, and added a little Treasure Gold here and there, then sanded again to make the high points more prominent.