"That's my Boy" by Melissa Struhs

Hello Again and thanks for dropping by the blog to see what the team has been up to this week!

I love the impact of oversized photo enlargements on a layout, but of course this leaves little room to get your Colour Blast product on. However, I will use this as an excuse to lay down a simple stencil and create a little detail in a corner or along an edge.

Firstly, I began with stamping stitched circular elements onto white cardstock with a black Staz on ink.

Then, a little fussy cutting around the shapes to really make them stand out.

My title has been inked with a platnium ink and had a Colour Embossing Powder in Steel heat set over the top.

A cute little label stamp has been inked with a powder blue and stamped twice onto white cardstock also.

Two images were created, one is remains unchanged 

and the other had the Steel Colour Embossing Powder added to it. 

You can see that I have used a 7 Dots Studio paper as my background, positioned two of my stamped circles in opposite corners and and then layered a stencil image over them.

The Snow White Colour Paste creates such a soft glittery effect over the white cardstock and light teal colouring of the paper.

The same stencil was used with Singin' the Blues and Snow White Colour Paste 

over the strip of patterned paper and photo enlargement. I think that some people still are quite reluctant to try this as they worry they will make a mess on the image and there is no salvaging it...I find that not overloading your palette knife with too much paste and only making a few gentle passes over the stencil prevents too many dramas.

But, if anything is less than perfect...there is always the option of layering other embellishments over the top to cover it. Here is a close up of the stamped label image, my powder blue print was trimmed and layered over the embossed Steel,

title and the photo stencilling.

I continued to build more embellishments, with the addition of a chipboard steampunk clock and corner flourish. These were inked with a chalky white colour

and spritzed with a Snow White Colour Shimmer Spray

The flourish was tucked into the lower corner of my photo

and the clock was mounted on a neutral patterned paper and overlapped over the top edge of the photo.

and all of the elements have now come together to create a soft and whimsical look for a black and white baby photo.

That's all from me till next time, have a crafty weekend!

Mel. 

"Cold day" by Amanda H

Welcome to today's blog post as we get to end of March!

I used to be someone who always did double layouts, with lots of patterned papers.... now I rarely do as my style has changed a lot! But for today's page I challenged myself to do a double, but with mixed media background. I enjoyed the challenge and love how the page turned out in the end!

Here is the page, and then I will show you the steps I took to achieve the page.

 Firstly, I used White Heavy Gesso on the 2 sheets of white cardstock. Applying it with a roller gives a smooth finish.

Next I chose two shades of blues in the Colour Shimmer Dusts: I went with Cobalt and Navy. I had my water spray bottle handy ready to activate the colour.

I sprayed water on the background and then dipped my paint brush in the Colour Shimmer Dust and added colour to the background. As I was doing a double, I lay both pages side by side, so that the colour was consistent  from one page to the next.

Once dry, I added Colour Paste in Singin' the Blues and Snow White. I added the colours through the stencil at the same time, so the colours mixed together slightly.

I added some splatters of Colour Shimmer Spray in Just Blue, with the wand.

While I had the Just Blue out, I also sprayed one of Charms Creations DIY arrows. These hand-sewn embellishments are great and so easy to colour with Colour Blast.

Nearer to the end of finishing my page, I realised I needed some splatters of black, so I used Colour Spray in Roadbase and tapped colour from the spray wand.

And here is the final page and some close up of the embellishment clusters that I created.

You can see the Charms Creations arrow coloured with Colour Shimmer Spray in this close up. 

Thanks for looking!

Freedom Hair by Rachel Dutko

Hi Colour Blasters! Rachel with you today with my layout

'Freedom Hair"

This is a photo of my sister, and after a lifetime of having to follow strict dress codes and uniforms for school and work, she finally fulfilled a dream.

The first step was to spray Violet and Road Base Colour Sprays onto cardstock. 

I then flicked some splatters with the same 2 sprays.

I then applied Just Blue Colour Paste through a stencil.

Love that shimmer!

Next I coloured some DIY Thickers with water- activated 

Cobalt Colour Shimmer Dust.

I then heat embossed the chipboard stars with Rose Petal Colour Embossing Powder. I coated the jar chipboard with White Heavy Gesso then painted with water-activated Lollipop and Midnight Colour Shimmer Dust.

I matted the photo with some cardstock and added a few embellishments 
and some stamping and doodling.

I finished off with some splatters of Cobalt and Lollipop Colour Shimmer Dusts to tie everything together. 

Thanks for looking

Rachel xx

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!

You can see some of the shimmer in this picture, isn't it beautiful?!

I love all the streaky texture from the paint brush with the gesso! And this is also a good one of the texture from the Colour Pastes!

I love, love, love the way all the colours blended together!

So, that is my share for today! I hope I inspire you to just get your products out and PLAY! It's so fun and relaxing!

Until next time, happy scrapping!

Melinda