Shop and Crop: Lets Play Tic Tac Toe

Hello

Is it really the middle of May already, I think I blinked and missed the first half of the month.

Have you participated in our monthly challenge yet, if not we would love to see you play along with us and if you have thank you for playing.

Do you remember how to play? Just choose a straight line, vertical, horizontal or even diagonal. The line I chose to play with was the one on top, stamping, flowers and a paper bag.

Would you like to see how I create my inspiration?

I went through my stash and found some paper bags, wasn't really sure which ones I had planned on using.

First I sanded the box as the outside was shiny, then I covered it with a couple of layers of gesso

I didn't just want to use a canvas or an artist board so I found the box in my cupboards, now I am not sure how long I have been carting the box around for, at least 12 yrs but I am positive its a lot longer than that, over the years it has been used for different things.

Once the gesso was dried, with the help of my heat gun, I worked out where I wanted my horizon line to sit, I marked this with a water colour pencil so if I needed to get rid of it all I need to use was water and wipe it away. If I had used a grey lead it would have been harder to remove and grey lead can leave an oil residue when you cover them so it still could show through depending on what you are covering it with.

I decided to use the black paper bag as at this stage I still had no idea what colours for the background I was going to use. I used a metal die and bigshot to cut a circle. I placed my die just off the edge of the bag so I had a flat edge, you will see on the finished piece that I actually cut another piece of the circle, so that I had two flat edges.

To create my table I used tissue paper, a stamp, watermark ink and clear embossing powder.

Using a matte gel I glued my tissue paper to the surface of the box. I also put a layer of the matte gel all over the surface of the box, this could prove useful as if I don't like something I can wipe it away and start again.

With a make up sponge I added my paint to the heat embossed tissue paper, keeping the layer of paint light so the texture of the embossing came through. I did loose a bit of the texture under the matte gel but I hit it with some heat and a bit more showed through.

To create the wall again I used a make up sponge to lay the paint down to keep it light. I used some ink and a stamp to add a little bit of interest. I didn't want a full impression of the stamp, so once my stamp was inked I used a piece of scrap paper to take some of the ink away.

Using matte medium I attached my paper bag vase and put another layer of medium over the surface of the box. Once this was dry I then found my green water colour pencil and drew the stems of my flowers, not that you actually see them but it gave me a shape to work with when sticking down my flowers.

To create them flowers I used a brown paper bag, a die and ran them through my die cutting machine. I folded my bag in half so I had four layers of paper. I ended up with 50 flowers, which I then used a white pen to draw around the inside edge and attached a small pearl to the middle.

Do you remember me saying that I covered the entire surface of the box with matte medium and in doing that if I didn't like something I could wipe it away. This came in handy when I was stamping the sentiment. Even though the surface of the box was flat it was slippery and also gave a little when I pushed the stamp onto so the sentiment was not great. I wiped it away and tried again, this time placing a hard surface underneath for support when I stamped.