Altenew Educator Programme – All About Layering 1

As I sit here tonight I can bearly sit still on my chair. This is my very first formal attempt at the Layering 1 class for feedback and progress in the AECP. It has taken me a few months to get started, but here I go.

The layering courses show both how to layer the beautiful images easily, but they also give tips and tricks on different ways to showcase the flowers. Layering 1 inspired me to go out of my comfort zone and not do a simple card, but to do a mixed media tag. Challenge accepted.

To start, I took a tag that I had already stenciled with puffy paint and a borrowed postmark stencil. I don’t know what it is called. To flatten the image and tone down the colour to make a flat background, I painted a few layers of white gesso over it.

2020-01-06 18.36.03
You can see the images are in the background so I can start to add my layers.

Next, I stamped the beautiful Painted Poppy stamp onto heavy plain card stock using my Altenew inks and Versamark black. I fussy cut the flowers and started to play around on where I wanted them on the tag. To create the second layer of the flower on the inside, I used the same red ink but because it is stamped multiple times it is subtly darker.

To have something to stand on and not just be floating, I used some brown washi tape to create a “ground”, and then stuck my flowers down, making sure to have some in the background.

2020-01-06 19.23.00

I glued everything down onto my tag using Heavy Gel multi-medium and also sealed the top layers – I find this useful because sure everything stays where you want it and you don’t get corners flapping up unless you specifically want them to. I also used a touch of the same red and green inks to lightly dabbed and smushed to give some background colour.

Then I used a sticker book to create my sentiment – I chose to reference Poppy Day and used the sentiment “Remember, 11, 11, 11” in honour of 100 years since Armistice Day. The sentiment seemed to flat a bit, so I drew around it with a Stabilo Marks-all pencil and used a wet paintbrush to smudge the edges.

Lastly, I used my very favourite products ever, Glass Bead Gel (thanks Dad for my pot) to give the centre of the flowers and the ground a bit of bling. What is a tag with no bling? πŸ™‚

2020-01-06 19.21.49

I also punched the tag hole at the top and used some seam binding I dyed with the red and green to finish the top.

2020-01-06 20.22.20

Here is my final tag.

2020-01-06 20.24.16

I look forward to any feedback and hope to continue my journey of making beautiful things as I learn.

Thank you for popping in, and I hope you are all having a good 2020 so far.

7 Comments

  1. Woah! That looks super cool! Lovely texture. Very well written post and nice set of photos too! Congrats on your first post!
    Thank you for entering your beautiful work to the AECP assignment gallery. Well done.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.