Turning Torn Paper into a Card Background

Hello All, Deena on the blog with you today.

Sometimes I struggle to think of what to share but this month was easy. I want to share with you how I created my card for the current challenge

If you click on current challenge above it will take you to the challenge post and you will see that the challenge is a mood palette. The colours are yellow, black and white. These three colours are not something that I have worked with together before so it did provided a little bit of thought, ok to be perfectly honest I had to put a lot of thought into.

I first created not one but two different art journal backgrounds. Both of the backgrounds were created using water, Lindy's Stamp Gang Spray and Archival Black Ink.

I didn't like either of them and I couldn't see where they were going. So I did something that I would normally not do, I torn them into strips. It felt really good to.

Now that I had ripped the pages into strips, what was I going to do with them? Current I am cutting 300gsm water colour paper into 8x8 squares for my journal pages, but I needed something a little more robust to support the strips. So I decided to use my mixed media paper that is (I think is the same gsm) stronger and doesn't warp for the support. As you can see below there is no rhyme or reason where the strips went, they are not all the same length or thickness. To glue them down and have a clear coating over the top I used my X-press It Triple Tac Glue. I use my Triple Tac for everything, from attaching paper to metal embellishments and everything in between.

Once i had completely cover the strips with the triple tac I then used my heat gun to dry it. There were two reasons for this. The first is that I am impatient and wanted it dry immediately and the second is that when drying it I could create more texture by causing the glue to bubble and leave those magical little lumps. In the photo above you can see them if you look closely.

When finished drying and creating texture i then used my paint scrapper to apply some gesso. Again I used by heat gun to dry the gesso, but not completely as I wanted to rub some of it off.

I decided that although I had a lot of texture I needed more colour so I found my Sunshine Yellow Alcohol Ink from Tim Holtz and while gently squeezing I ran the bottle across the top of my page which I was holding on an angle to let the ink run down my page.

The paper has been through a lot but I haven't finished with it yet. Using my nail I scrapped it down the right had side causing bits of the paper to come away and then I carefully remove a strip of paper from the left hand side of my card. I then applied more gesso with my scrapper and wiping away the excess. When I finally finished and stopped and look at my background it reminded me of weathered painted wood.

The final step was to add my gorgeous flower, some muslin and thin black ric rack. All attached with my Triple Tac Glue.