Butterfly colour drips

I’m trying to use some of the supplies that have been sitting unloved in my stash. I’ve pretty much given up on ever catching up with all the stamps, dies and stencils, but I do hold out hope that I can make a large dent in the backlog of paints, embossing powders and other colouring mediums. I admit it, I have a problem. YouTube is a bad influence…

Though I can’t blame YouTube for this one. This is down to a blogger here on WordPress who will remain nameless because it was a while ago, I’ve forgotten who it was and I cannot find the post again. She posted about the pinkest pink, a powder pigment created by Stuart Semple and sold through Culture Hustle and, well, I just had to get some.

But you can’t just buy one thing. Not when there’s postage to pay. So I got the set of four paints.

And this jar was my first experiment using them. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do — not winging it, for a change. I wanted a white jar with a lace band around the middle, topped with the appliqué butterfly and some flowers, with multicolour drips running down.

So that’s what I did. I gessoed the jar and covered it with crackle paste. When that was dry, I added the lace strip to the middle and the rope at the neck, followed by the butterfly, flowers, stones and gravel. More white gesso over everything and then it was time to add the drips.

Given how thinly I mixed the powders so they would drip easily, I am impressed with the strength of colour in the drips. It will be interesting to use them at full strength.

I decided to try out the Viva ceramic effect paste on the fabric and flowers. It created a nice even texture but it is not a bright white and everything merged together more than I liked.

So I painted the butterfly white, added a touch of sparkly blue to the tips of the petals and finished it off with a half pearl in the centre of the butterfly.

Supplies:

• Prep & Stick:
  Liquitex white gesso
  Ranger multi-medium matte
  Aleene’s fast grab tacky glue
• Texture:
  DecoArt media crackle paste
  Viva ceramic effect matte
• Colour:
  Stuart Semple – pink, yellow, blue, green
  Copic opaque white
  Finnabair sparks – magical pond
• Paper & Fabric:
  appliqué butterfly
  lace strip
• Embellishments:
  paper flowers
  half pearl
  Cadence art stones – x-large
  Colorall decoration gravel – white

This jar was created in March 2018 during my month of mixed media experimentation.