CROP Challenge - LOVE

Good Morning All.

This is a long post with lots of pictures

This month's challenge at my local CROP was LOVE.

Now when most of you think about love, you will probably immediately be thinking cutesy and fluffy with lots of bright reds and pinks all over the place.  Normally I would be too, however I wanted to do something a little different and alternative for this challenge that would still get the message across.

To achieve this I went for something a lot darker, and a bit more Steampunky than you might expect.

This was my final result, I think the overall look is really cool and grungy and the heart inside really tactile and apart from the shape totally lifelike.

 


















It's hard to convey in the photo just exactly how much texture there is on the heart, but it really adds something and is so simple to achieve.  I'd like to thank Mark Gould for introducing me to the technique (if you haven't heard of him then check out, his blog link is my front page).

So now onto the tutorial, as usual I will give the list of materials before we start:

The Works Wooden Heart Box
Tando Creative Wings and Cogs
Hobbycraft Self Adhesive Pearl Gems
Treasure Gold Gilt Wax
Crawford and Black Acrylic Paint - Crimson Red, White
Reeves Acrylic Paint - Deep Madder
Royal and Langnickel Acrylic Paint - Dioxazine Purple
Key shaped brad
Poundland Lasercut chipboard shapes
7cm Polystyrene Heart
White Tissue Paper
Small Bronze Key  (any key will do as long as its smaller than the size of the heart.  Mine was from Artful Days goodie box)

There are two parts to this piece, the box and the heart; we are going to start with the heart.


Firstly take your sheet of white tissue paper and crumple it up into a ball; unfold and crumple your ball at least four times.  Once you have uncrumpled your ball for the last time, tear the tissue into segments.

Take some Mod Podge and cover your heart with it, try not to put too thin a layer on.  When you have the Mod Podge on take one of your tissue segments and lay it over the heart making sure that you retain the crumples.  You may need to use some more Mod Podge to stick the tissue down.  Repeat with additional tissue segments until you have at least two layers covering your heart.  You can then either set this aside to dry or use a heat gun to dry the glue.  If you decide to use the heat gun then don't hold it too close or on one place too long or you may cause the Mod Podge to bubble.

Once your glue has completely dried, paint over the tissue paper with the Crimson Red paint making sure to get into all the nooks and crannies of the crumples.  If you need to, add a second coat of this colour to ensure that you get a good coverage, the put aside to dry.

Taking some of the deep madder, paint a patchy layer over the red ensuring that some of the base layer shows through.  This only needs to be a thin layer so it should dry quite quickly and you can move onto the next stage.

Make a very loose wash using the Diox purple and paint this over the entire surface of the heart making sure that you get some pooling in the nooks and crannies.  Dry this layer using your heat tool  (this is an important step as it really sets the grunge texture).  Its this combination of colours and wash that really gives it that raw heart look, you could stop here but following on with the dry brushing really enhances the look.

What follows next are a number of photos showing the progressive dry brushing of the heart which I will explain after the photos.

Put some of the deep madder onto your palette and add a little white to it and mix.  Take a stiff brush and load it with a small amount of the paint, then wipe most of it off onto a paper towel.  This may seem counter-intuitive to load up and then wipe off, but dry brushing needs to be down subtle and works best with the gentle addition of layers of paint.

Once most of the paint is off the brush then start brushing it over your heart,  if you start seeing paint in the areas between the crumples then you have too much paint on your brush, and you need to wipe more of it off on your paper towel.

You need to repeat this dry brushing technique at least four more times each time adding a little more white to the paint you've already mixed.  As you move through the lighter colours you should see the paint building up on the ridges of the crumples highlighting the texture (this is the effect that we are trying to achieve).  It is up to you how light you go, but in this case you don't want to end up with pure white, so I would suggest a total of 5 layers of dry brushing should be enough.

When you are happy that you have enough layers of dry brushing clean off your brush and set the heart aside to dry for about 10 minutes.

After the 10 minutes have passed tale the same stiff brush that you used for the dry brushing and make sure that it is really dry before continuing.  Dip the brush into the Treasure Gold wax and again wipe it on a paper towel to take off the excess.  Dry brush this wax over your heart and you should see that it really accentuates the dry brushing you did in the previous steps.  Again how many layers of wax you add is up to you but I would suggest subtly and only do one to two layers.

From here it is just about adding embellishments to your heart, I didn't want to add too many as I was going to be using the box to hold everything and complete the look.

Take some fine black chain and loop it around your heart and through the loop on your key, securing it at the back with a pin or staple.  I used a jump ring that I cut in half and pushed into the heart to secure the chains and prevent them from slipping.

This is the end of the heart part of this piece.

Moving on to the box, I can't say too much as it is based on techniques developed by Andy Skinner and people have paid to do his course (link at the end of this post, and I highly highly recommend you do it.), but I can give you some general tips in its decoration.

Take an ordinary wooden box and add some self adhesive pearls to act as rivets (these are all going to be covered in gesso later so it doesn't matter what colour they are)

Add some embellishments to all sides of the box, sticking them down using tacky glue.  I have used these laser cut chipboard shapes from Poundland to add my interest.

Again stick down the wings from the wings and cogs set using tacky glue.  To make sure that they don't overlap the outside of the box you need to overlay them over the heart aperture.

Once all of the embellishments have been stick down and are dry, remove the acetate from the box aperture and discard.  The idea is to be able to feel and really see the texture that you created on the heart without opening the box.

The next stage is to cover all of the box both inside and out with black gesso.  This will give you a good base to work from and even out all of the different surfaces.  In order to get a good covering you may need to use several coats of gesso (once you have painted the inside do not close the box until the gesso is fully dry or it will stick shut).  Depending on what kind of embellishments you have used you may need to use some smaller brushes to get in to the nooks and crannies.

Its the painting stage of this process that I can't really talk about (although I can show you some pictures of the completed stages), but suffice to say it involves several layers of dry brushing over the textures and embellishments to create that typical aged metallic Steampunk look.

There are several tutorials online which can give you the basic colours for creating aged metals using acrylic paints (Pinterest is a good source of inspiration).

If you wanted to add more texture to your box, then before you start the dry brushing stipple two layers of gesso over the entire surface drying between each layer.

I know this has been a long post but I hope that you've enjoyed the process and learned a few things along the way.

Andy Skinner Workshop: http://bosw.andyskinnercrafts.com/index.html

Any questions or comments leave them below.

Good Bye Until Next Time.