Guest Design Spot @ AVJ

Hi Everyone,

I am thrilled to be sharing with you today a shadow box that I have made for A Vintage Journey following an invitation from Brenda to do a Guest Design spot for their April challenge.    The theme as chosen by Sandy who is hosting this challenge is "Spring is in the Air" and has described the challenge as follows:-

Leave those winter blues behind. Make anything that says SPRING using pastel colours. It is your choice, a card, canvas, 3D or a tag, etc. but remember it should be in one of the styles that we like to see.

 

 I started by crumpling up some tissue paper and gluing it to the back frame of a canvas using glue and seal and a brush, I let it dry whilst I started the background,

 

I used Postal tissue wrap to cover a piece of card I had already measured and cut to fit the inside of the shadow box

Next I used Cracked Pistachio, Twisted Citron, Fossilised amber and Tumbled glass distress inks as a watercolour to colour the tissue wrap.  I gave it a quick dry brush with gesso and then used Decoart crackled texture paste through two stencils I made from the mixed media 2 thinlets set. 

 I used the bird feather stamp set to stamp the blackbird, you can see on the 2nd photo the difference between using black archival ink and versafine, the versafine one on the top is much clearer.  I used distress crayons to colour the blackbird and  used clear embossing powder to give him a glaze and lift the colours a little.  I also used the next from this stamp set on the background using Potting soil archival.

I stamped a few grasses in the background with a very old Tim Holtz stamp set which you can see below it's called Natures Elements.  I knocked this back a little with watered down gesso as I felt the colours were a bit strong. 



The flowers were die-cut using Watercolour paper and the smallest flower from the Bigz Tattered Florals and then each flower was shaped using a ball tool.  The flower centres were cut using a small flower punch from thin card painted with Shabby Shutters DP.  The stamen were cut down and held in the centre of the flowers with silicone glue, left to dry and then the tips painted with Spiced Marmalade paint. You can see from the photo I had quite a conveyor belt going on with these flowers!  

I used Silicone glue once again to glue them on to a real twig. The nest stamped on the picture below was just on scrap card to give me an idea where to place the flowers. 

I wanted to give a bit more dimension to the stamped nest so I cut a few branches using Autumn gatherings decorative strip and painted them with Walnut Stain DP,  I also used a few on another twig.  Next I die-cut some grasses from green core card using Winter Foliage thinlets, and  some netting using Mixed media set 1 which was then coloured with distress stains.



At this stage I was happy with the background and turned my attention back on to the shadow box frame itself.

A few more distress ink colours and tissue tape made the letters to spell out SPRING and the vintage ribbon was coloured with the same colours to make a bow.

The garden twine was simply wrapped around the frame and secured in the corners with a knot both on the back and on the front.  The bow was added to the top left corner, I made a few eggs for the nest, and a stamped butterfly (Indigo Blu) was added to pick up the blue of the eggs.

 Finally, I used a glue gun to secure the blackbird, twigs and letters.

 Here are a few close up photo's, hope you enjoy

 

Thank you as always for your visit today.

Mo x