Seascape doubled

I had absolutely no intention of making this panel. Unlike so many other things, the idea for it had not been lurking in the back of my mind for months. This panel only exists because I had a bit of a rearrange in my craft room.

It was more of a shuffling than a full-on rearrange: all the furniture is in the same place, but quite a few things have been moved around to make everything a little more accessible. It really had to be done. I had been letting things get a bit cluttered and that was made worse by my other half who keeps buying me art and craft supplies — which is lovely and I will never turn down more stash — but I have come to the conclusion that a tiny bit of his motivation is to make my craft room as untidy as his workroom so I can’t complain about his stuff overflowing around the house 🙂

Anyway… in the process of finding homes for all the scattered stuff, I came across a tub of random bits which included a spare alcohol ink panel made two years ago when I did my surfing ducky card, a bit of coloured gauze, and a blue-green panel from, nope, absolutely no idea when that was made… I picked them up together, thought they went quite well together, and decided to assemble them there and then rather than put them back in the box for another year or more.

I could have stopped there, but, instead, I decided to get recursive and create a similar but larger seascape to mount it on.

I started with some collage papers and acrylic paints for the base layer and then added smears of embossing paste to give the sky texture and crackle paste for the land. The crackle paste shoreline follows the waterline in the small alcohol ink piece and the horizon lines are similarly balanced. More acrylic paint, some mixed with glazing liquid, added colour over the texture.

The sun was made by creating a circular dam with glass paint outliner and then filling it with Pebeo moon and prisme paints which give an interesting pattern. While that was drying (which takes a while), I dug through my stash of charms and found a couple of anchors; they were extremely shiny, so I aged them with rust effect pastes. I also added a dark charcoal edge on the panels.

Almost there. But I wasn’t happy with the sun, or more specifically, the way it felt a bit stuck on, rather than being an integral part of the picture. I pondered ways to fix it and decided that it needed clouds. There was the cloudy texture in the background, but these needed to go in front of the sun.

Cotton wool to the rescue. I dabbed some glue on the panel and then teased out some thin bits of cotton wool from a pad and stuck them in place. I’ll be honest, at this point I was regretting that decision. It looked a little bit playschool… But, not one to be defeated easily, I had a think and then dabbed grey Distress Oxide ink over it to tone down the whiteness and it worked. The clouds blend into the background with enough colour variation to make them interesting and they do the job of making the sun part of the whole.

So, from a handful of unloved scraps with no intent or idea to a finished piece… I should tidy up more often 🙂

Supplies:

• Prep & Stick:
  Liquitex white gesso
  Aleene’s fast grab tacky glue
  Golden satin glazing liquid
• Texture:
  DecoArt Media crackle paste
  Dreamweaver embossing paste – white
• Colour:
  Adirondack alcohol inks
  Pebeo acrylic paints
  Cern’Couleurs glass paint outliner – gold
  Pebeo Moon – gold
  Pebeo Prisme – antique gold
  Finnabair rust effect paste – patina set
  Distress oxide – pumice stone
  Ranger archival ink – paradise teal
  Derwent XL charcoal – black, sepia, white
• Pens & Pencils:
  Faber-Castell graphite aquarelle 2B
• Stamps:
  Visible Image – set the tone
• Paper & Fabric:
  That’s Crafty 8×8 greyboard panel with rounded corners
  watercolour paper
  Yupo
  gauze
• Miscellaneous:
  metal anchor charms
  cotton wool pad