"Precious" by Melissa Struhs

Hello again Colour Blast Fans!

I am so pleased to have finished this layout. It was certainly proved to be a challenging one for sure. Yellow is not usually a colour I use very often and I really struggled to be honest. 

The finished result I am really happy with....so let's see how it all happened.

Step1. I primed the white cardstock with a light coat of gesso.

Step 2. A white crackle medium was mixed with Lemon Zing Colour Mica Powder to create a pastel tone.

Step 3. The White Heavy Gesso is ultra thick as I have been leaving the lid open for a few hours a day. I do this purely to make it easier to pass over stencils without the unwanted bleeding through the template.

Step 4. With my palette knife, both of the previous 2 mediums are slightly mixed over a small damask stencil and allowed to dry naturally.

Step 5. I dug out all of the yellow tones I could find in my Colour Blast stash.

Step 6. With a little water in a paint palette, a tiny amount of Sunflower Colour Shimmer Dust was dissolved and lightly painted randomly.

Step 7. To increase the intensity of the yellow colouring, Saffron Colour Spray was chosen.

Step 8. It was painted over the Gesso in some spots and quite heavy splashes were also applied with a fan brush.

Step 9. Next, I really wanted some sections of highly metallic so Sunshine in the Colour Shimmer Cube was activated with water.

Step 10. A few minutes later, by swishing a tiny brush in the cube, there was a nice amount to use.

Step 11. The intensity of colour was used to highlight around the damask with a lovely pooling effect.

Step 12. I did several pieces as an experiment and as much as I loved them, the colours were too much for the papers and photo's lined up on my desk.

After several hours of shuffling things around, I decided to chop into the pieces. I know! Crazy right? But sometimes, it can be saved and used in a entirely different way than you first planned.

I used a photo negative strip transparency as the base of an embellishment and some strips of the stencilled and coloured image was cut to fill the spaces. It actually show the pattern quite nicely, even if it is quite minimal now. 

And a larger piece was cut to the create a layer of texture behind and open heart laser cut chipboard piece and really is quite pretty placed over the black and white photo.

To break up all of the light tones of the patterned paper, I flicked Roadbase Colour Spray around the embellishment.

The contrast colour of  the black Roadbase matches other darker elements on the layout too.

Moral of the Story - don't just bin it, find another solution.

Till next time,

Mel.