Butterflies and Gold

The challenge this month over at The Mixed Media Card Blog is all about Butterflies with gold as an optional element. Well obviously with my love of butterflies I couldn't go past this challenge.

I am not one to throw things out and in fact if I have left over paint, ink, etc I usually find a journal page or a piece of mixed media paper to use it up on. That's what the background of this card started its life as. I had created another project that used pink paint so I mopped it up with my mixed media paper and in the draw this piece sat until last night.

Pink is not one of my go to colours and I wasn't enthused about using this background but it was there so I used it. To cover up most of the pink I used my palette knife to apply a thin layer of gesso over the surface. I thought to myself this is something that I can now work with.

Just recently I had seen some printed tissue paper that was black with white as the accent colour. I thought it to be quite unusual because normally it is the other way around. To use that as inspiration I found a white doily, cut it in half and painted it with black gesso, I then gently sanded it to give the black paint a distressed look. I added further white detail with my white Gelly Roll pen.

Using my black archival ink and Prima - Old Town stamp, I set about giving the background some depth before I stuck down my embellishments. Deciding this wasn't enough I used some texture paste that I mixed with Viva Precious Metal Colour - Orange Yellow and stencilled it through my The Crafter Workshop - 6x6 Mini Cofffe Splotch. I thought adding the Viva Precious Metal Colour to the texture paste it would come out a pale gold colour. I was mistaken, once dry it was a mustard yellow colour which was not nice at all. By this stage the texture paste was dry and was not going to be removed without destroying what I already had done. So out I pulled my container that held my trusty Faber-Castell Big Brush Pens and coloured the texture paste.

Once I was happy with my background I gave it some more rough treatement by using my distress tool on the edges of the paper. I stuck down my doily, gauze, my stamped and gold heat embossed image from the Prima Rust & Dust Set and finally my butterflies.

My butterflies were created by painting Viva Precious Metal Colour on normal white cardstock then using my Martha Stewart Butterfly punch. To finish of the butterflies I rubbed my Blood Orange Gelato over the top and went around the edge with my big brush pen.

Happy Creating