Back when I was in Knoxville for one of my JTV appearances, I found a Hobby Lobby and managed to keep from dragging home the entire store. I did, however get some new carving material – it’s very thin and it was quite affordable, even with the ridiculous Canadian exchange rate. I didn’t get a chance to work it until recently, however. It took a while to get the hang of it (note to self: don’t start in the center when you don’t know what you’re doing!!) but I accidentally discovered a way to make beautiful curves and curls – something that was nearly impossible (for me) on the speedball lino blocks. Needless to say, I immediately went bonkers.
I am certainly not perfect with it – but a few of those curls ARE perfect, and I intend to do a whole second sheet in this paisley pattern as soon as I get a chance.
Meantime, I did some test impressions of this sheet, and was quite pleased! I have to clean up a few pieces of the texture but I really, REALLY like the effect:
That gorgeous metal effect is more of my Pan Pastels from the last post. I SWEAR I meant to bake these and use them to work with swellegant, but somehow… that didn’t work out. The metallic shine is just so attractive; and I wanted to see how it worked in conjunction some of my other mica powders.
I wasn’t completely happy with how these came out. I had gone a little too crazy with the powders on some of these. A few came out okay:
But most of the others were … contrast-less. The details weren’t showing. I tried sanding the colour off the high points and that worked, sorta:
While getting the dust from sanding off, I realized that I could polish the mica up a bit, so I tried that, and it was OK too:
But still… not what I wanted. I wanted BRIGHT and POP. So I looked around and my eyes fell on my Jacquard Lumiere Halo Paints – and I thought, AHA!
And just before I began, I thought I may as well record what I was about to do, since this was a technique I’d stumbled on by myself and maybe others would like it, so here’s what I did next:
After all of that I STILL wasn’t entirely satisfied. This was SO weird for me – I don’t generally re-do things so often; I’ll usually toss it aside or use it as-is. But I knew there was something special waiting here. The way the blue/green/gold came out was PERFECT – I just felt that the purple/pink wasn’t as bright as I’d wanted. I think I probably poked at it more than I should have.
I knew just what to do with a pale purple – my trusty Ranger Ink in bright pink. I added a lot on some and basically dry-brushed others, just to enhance that colour contrast.
And finally, FINALLY, I got what I wanted!!! High contrast on the relief, bright & variegated colours, and an overall shine. Some of these look like beetles!
I feel that I can now let these become jewellery – or maybe, I’ll put a few up for sale as components? We’ll see where the week takes us!
Full Disclosure: each of these links is carrying my Amazon affiliates link. No need to use these links if you don’t want to – but you should know that if you do use them to order your pliers, a few pennies will be sent my way by Amazon.