Me doing 3D stuff

Many of you will know that I am not comfortable doing 3D crafting, so Sunday's workshop with Pauline Butcher was always going to be a challenge for me.  However, I survived, despite a mini meltdown through my own stupidity.

The base for this project was a three panelled piece designed and produced by Candy Box Crafts, and involved a technique I have never used - crackling.  This involved decisions right from the start, difficult when I had not decided for sure what my theme was going to be.  I had originally thought of doing large flowers in each of the three panels, but at the last moment changed my mind to using the Pollyanna Pickering creatures.

So my base coat was orange, which then had to dry before applying the crackle glaze.  That had to be left for quite a while to dry thoroughly.  While waiting for that, we stamped and heat embossed our extra bits on to heat resistant acetate, and coloured them in with alcohol inks.  I used a technique learned from Maria Simms, with dry inks picked up with the Ranger Blending Pen.  Then we cut them out, not too much fussy cutting here as the acetate is very forgiving.

The three panels were the next to be done and I just kept it simple, using Versafine Sepia for the main images.  This was where my meltdown came in.  I had cut beautiful accurate masks for those three beautiful images, but left them at home.  I needed to create a simple landscape behind each one.  Fortunately, I had got a bottle of drawing gum in my bag so I just brushed that all round the edges which protected the stamped images from the ink on the blending brushes, easy to rub off afterwards.  Disaster averted!

By now, the crackle glaze was ready and the magic could be applied, this being the top layer of acryllic paint.  I used the Paper Artsy Snowflake.  As you apply this top coat liberally, you can watch it just cracking in front of you, allowing hints of the undercoat to show through.  Clever stuff!

After that, it was really time to pack up, leaving the adding of the acetate etc to be finished at home later.  That did take me quite a while as I felt that my original ideas were too heavy for the delicate stamps.  So there was a lot of trimming of leaves and adding subtle stamping round the frame of feathers and leaves.  Like most of us, I know I would have done some things differently in hindsight, but I learned a lot and I am not too displeased with the results.  I shall be adding some light stencilling to the reverse of each panel, but other tasks have to be dealt with first.

Thank you, Pauline, for challenging me and giving me new ideas to play with.  Looking forward to the next class.