Through the arched window

 

Hi there!

It’s Celia here with this weeks theme -  nature. I've just got hold of some of the Chocolate Baroque flower stamps, so I thought these would be perfect. I used a large arch for this project. I thought it would be fun to try and make it into a window.

I painted the arch frame with Burnt Umber and the back with Titan Buff. Then I applied some crackle paste to the frame and immediately sprinkled some different embossing powders over, whilst the paste was still wet. Then I set it aside to dry. I have been binge-watching Tim Holtz's fb lives and the one on embossing glazes gave me this idea. When the paste was dry and cracked, I heated the embossing powder. As it melts, it runs down into the cracks to give a very cool effect. I dabbed on some paint in a few areas to blend it all together.

For the back piece, I blobbed on some crackle paste, sand paste and modelling paste to get some texture going on. When this was dry, I went in with some washes of Burnt Umber, Sap Green and Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide, dabbing them on in different places. I kept adding paint until I was happy with the result. Then I added some gilding paste in a few places for highlights.

For the window, I used a piece of acrylic that came with some stamps. I cut it to just smaller than the arch frame, and stamped the flowers from the Thistle Butterfly set from Chocolate Baroque, using black Stazon. I used a stamping platform for this as I am a terrible stamper and usually smudge it! Then I coloured it. I started using Promarkers, but as they are alcohol based they smudged the ink. I dabbed it on carefully in some places and used various other pens to get the effect I wanted. 

I wanted to add some leaves to the background, but since it's all bumpy I couldn't stamp directly on. So I stamped on to tissue and glued it on with mat medium. The edges disappeared nicely into the texture, so I was pleased with the result!

To assemble the piece, I stuck the acetate to the frame with double sided tape. I then used some book tape to make a hinge so that the window opens and closes.

Here's the finished frame:

Thanks for stopping by,

Celia x