Colour Blast by Bee Arty: Live Bigger 2017 with Melinda Sweetman

Hi there and welcome to the Colour Blast blog today! Melinda here with you playing with lots of different products to create a fun, clean, mixed media page!! Yep, you read that correctly, a fun CLEAN mixed media page ;)

If you would like to see this page come together from beginning to end here is the process video

And here are my step-by-steps

First up I picked a paper from a paper pad that I didn't love and gave it a thick-ish coat of White Heavy Gesso with this big paint brush. I used this brush because I wanted to fun texture in the gesso.

After the gesso was dried I added some stamping with black staz-on ink. I wasn't 100% certain where I was going with this just that I wanted lots of colour and texture. I did know it was going to be cut up into smaller pieces so I did a lot of stamping ;)

I just mentioned I wasn't 100% sure where I was going with this so decided to work with the blues and greens in all the different products.

I have pulled out in order from left to right, back to front, Apple of My Eye, Envy, Deep Water, Singin' The Blues and Just Blue in the Colour Shimmer Sprays, Rainforest, Lagoon, Sapphire and Carribean in the Colour Sprays. On the end is the Steel and Bling Colour Shimmer Sprays which I added as a "neutral".

Navy, Duke, Peacock and Paris in the Colour Shimmer Dust. And finally, Apple of My Eye, Singin' The Blues, Just Blue, Deep Water, Bling and Steel in the Colour Pastes.

I started with the Colour Shimmer Dust in Navy, Duke, Peacock and Paris. I simply sprinkled a little of the dust on the page (completely drying between colours), added water until the colour was very fluid and then tipped and tilted the page to get some colour happening. And above is what it started to look like.

A little tip when you do this, if you wet an already dried colour it will re-activate so make sure you are using colours that will blend nicely together ;)

Next, I moved onto my sprays.

I have used Just Blue Colour Shimmer Spray, Apple of My Eye Colour Shimmer Spray and Sapphire Colour Spray. I simply sprayed the colour right where I wanted it and in some cases added a little water to make it more fluid and again, dried thoroughly between colours.

Time for some different texture! I grabbed a 6x6 stencil and used a combination of Apple of My Eye and Deep Water Colour Pastes through the whole stencil on 3 different parts of the page. It is quiet subtle but does give some fun texture and I love it!

With all that black stamping in the background I decided I wanted to bring some more of the black to the front of the page so simply used a paint brush and some packaging and mixed some Black Heavy Gesso with water to make it very fluid and dripped black dots and splatters all over the page. I then left this overnight to dry naturally.

As I was laying in bed trying to sleep the idea hit me - TRIANGLES!! So when I got back to work I used my paper trimmer, scissors and also a quilters ruler and stanley knife to cut all different sized triangle. The stanely knife and quilters ruler were used specifically to cut out the middle of the big triangle! How awesome and fun do these triangles look!!

And the final step, of course was laying all the triangles out and sticking everything down in a way that I loved.

This was a super fun project to work on and like I said, an AWESOME way to get some fun mixed media on your page without the "messy" look of it!!

Here is my completed page!

I did add a few extra stamps in the background/on top of the triangles and also inked all the way around the edge of my white cardstock with black staz-on, which if you are after a cleaner look you can simply leave off!

Here are a few close ups!