Seascape Guest Design for AVJ

Hi Everyone,

Very excited today to be bringing you my Guest Design piece for A Vintage Journey. Thank you so much to Nikki, Brenda and the team for asking me back again.

Their latest challenge is all about Embossing Paste and Texture and is hosted by the lovely Astrid  this is how she described the challenge.

Use any kind of texture paste (home made, crackle, coloured or plain) on your projects. There is an endless variety available, so play, have fun and apply it to your heart's content. Use it through stencils, randomly or in whatever way you want, but remember it should be in one of the vintage; shabby; mixed media; art journalling; industrial or steampunk styles that we favour. Put on your mixed media hat and create some magic!

Well I love texture in my projects so I needed no encouragement to get out my various embossing pastes and play. I having been wanting to do a seascape canvas for a while now and this theme gave me the perfect opportunity to do this. 

 First I gathered together my Dapper paper pad, Canvas, stencils, various embossing pastes

Using two of the Dapper papers I made a very rough beach/sky background by gluing them onto the canvas

 

Next I knocked the colour back a little by dry brushing with white Gesso

 I scraped a few wispy clouds over the sky using white embossing paste 

and mixed some white embossing paste with a little antique linen paint to get a coloured paste and used this to get some texture on the beach again using a palette knife

 

I created a sun ray using the same coloured paste and the Rays stencil, using a stiff paint brush I then gently brushed the paste to get a softer effect. I  used a couple more stencils to create  a a fence and a rocky area 

  I changed over to a glossy white embossing paste next to create a few waves

mixing the glossy white paste with stormy sky paint, I dabbed in the sea so it filled the gap between the waves and the sun ray. I also went over the sides of my canvas with this paste  

A few more solid clouds were also added using the Matt  white embossing paste

 This next step involved mixing a realistic sand paste.  Tim Holtz showed us how to do this for his

July 14 tag using antique linen and black embossing powder, glossy accents and gold distress glitter.  The link of Tim showing you how is HERE.  I spread the paste over the sand area using a palette knife.  You will notice I have gone over some of my stencilled rocky area as I didn't like the effect.

 Making sure I went over the sides of my canvas 

 I painted in between the paste with distress paints that matched the top (antique linen, stormy sky, faded jeans) and blended them with white

 I wanted to create a horizon and blend in the sun rays down to the sea a little more so I used my antique linen and black distress crayons to do this

  I added a little boat on the horizon and toned down the yellow glare of the sun ray with a wash of stormy sky paint

 A change of paste again, this time I turned to my DecoArt crackle paste and speckles stencil 

 To add a few crackled seashells and pebbles on the beach 

I toned these down with a wash of pumice stone paint.  I also used the same paint to create shadows on the sand from the fence and drew the wire linking up the stakes of the fence with a pencil

Now all I need was a few beach huts and for this I turned to the remainder of the blue Dapper paper I had started with as the pattern on them was a beach hut shape.  I cut out 3 and used the stripes stencil and the glossy embossing paste to create the white stripes, small strips of the shirts on the reverse side made the roof edges.  To give the beach huts more depth I glued them on to mount board, cut them out and painted the white raw edges blue.

 

 I created the sentiment from the same paper cutting up existing wording and re-arranging the letters

I added a few real shells and seaweed, I picked these off my local beach the shells are tiny. A few more shadows were added to the beach huts but no doors on view because of course they too are looking towards the sea.  

Finally a few close ups to enjoy

 Thank you so much if you have taken the time to see this post to the end and I hope you enjoyed seeing how it all came together. 

Mo x