Animal Magnetism!

Good Morning to you!
Didn't we have a well suited challenge last month!! As we all created our Seaside projects the country was bathed in glorious sunshine and scorching heat!!! What a shame it can't be like that now the school holidays are here. Typical!

The Projects for the challenge have been fantastic as ever and it is amazing to see how everyone can come up with such different ideas with stamps and even when they have had to improvise they have still kept to the theme!

So it is now a new month and therefore the start of a new challenge...and this month we are having the theme of .....ANIMALS.

There are some stunning projects over at Clarity Stamp Challenge Blog to bring you inspiration and all very different I hope you can take the time to pop over to look and hop to the different blogs of the DT to see their projects in more detail!

Here is the one I have done for this months challenge.

 

 

This started off as a plain papier mache box which I painted with gesso and then 2 coats of cream acrylic paint. I prefer cream to white as it gives a warmer look to the background but without distorting the colours used for the images. Then I left it to dry completely.

Whilst it was drying I got the next stage done which is to stamp the images onto mansize tissues. I chose the diamond horse. I like this image as it has a lovely tail. I used 8 different colours of versafine inks- smokey grey, onyx black, crimson red, satin red, toffee, vintage sepia, imperial purple and habenero. 

These were allowed to dry then cut out as close to the image as possible  this took a bit of doing but well worth doing carefully and properly. The tissue images need then to be separated to just the one ply. Only the top layer is required.

Once this had been done and the box was ready to decorate. To attach the tissue horses to the box I used Slap-it-on form Indigo blu. This acts as a glue and thenm as a glaze to the surface. You need a nice soft brush to apply a thin layer of slap it on then attach the image then gently brush over the surface with slap it on. I made sure that I mixed up the colours of the horses and covered the box and lid inside and out. You need to allow time to do this to dry in between parts and remember to wrap the images around corners and edges to give a seamless finish. You can see that you need to overlap the images and you get lovely depths of colours that way. Once completely covered it need to dry properly and then be coated all over again a couple of times with slap it on. This dries to a matt finish which again allows the colours to come through. I then used a water soluble matt varnish all over it to add another layer of protection.

 

 

I was going to leave it at that but to me it did not look finished. I then came up with the idea of having miniature horses dancing around the top so stamped the image onto shrink plastic in black stazon. These I attached to the lid with some strong clear gel glue. However I wasn't happy about how this now looked as you could see the glue. I needed something to hide it....BRAINWAVE....I need something that will look like grass so I got the flowersoft out and a bit cosmic shimmer glue and Voila!!!
 

 

I hope you have enjoyed looking at my project.
Please feel free to leave any comments and don't forget to pop over to the other Design Teams blogs
Then its over to you to have a go and remember there is a voucher for £50 to be won by someone to spend at the Claritystamp website.

Happy Crafting

Jane xx