Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Today it's my day of fun and I, Inger, would like to continue one of my favourite themes, recycling. This time I'm focusing on tissue paper and I have a tutorial for you!

This is most of the stuff I've used. I seldom seem to be able to take a before picture with all things, I always make it up as I go along. If I'm not pleased with the outcome, I add something else.

• gel medium (I used semi-gloss)
  
• glazing medium
• matte acrylic paint (MM)
• lumiere acrylic paint
• book paper
• music notes
• old stamps and paper from the post office (roughly 40 years old)
• tissue paper
• stencils
• punchinella (sequin waste)

When I came up with this technique I only used music papers and book pages. I liked that look a lot.

Brush on gel medium, put the scraps on the paper and brush on some additional gel medium to make sure its stuck. The coverage depends on how much you want the text to show through. You don't have to add this much! It takes some time!

Tissue time. I added a lot of tissue, next time I'll add a little less! The less tissue I add, the more text shines through which I like.

Time for next step which is colouring the whole thing! I grabbed some green colours and some purple for contrast. The glazing medium is important. It's mixed with the acrylic paint and makes it transparent. Without that the paint would be opaque and you would not see any of the papers underneath.

I wasn't happy with the outcome so I added some Lumiere, metallic rust. Much better!

I want a lot of texture. I used gel medium over stencils and punchinella to give me that. Let it dry. A tip to speed up the drying time is to put it on a radiator, although not an electrical one!

Drying...

Dried!

Now I want to accentuate the texture and I choose copper to do that. I put it on my fingers and brush it on the paper. You can also use metallic rubons, lumiere or rub n buff.

Highlighted. I painted the snow flakes with hi lite red, lumiere, a wonderful colour.

Some close ups. Can you see the snow flakes and the holes from the punchinella?


And what did I make of this background? Well, some christmas cards of course. Maybe it's not the most typical colours for christmas but I always like to twist things around.

I really like this green colour so I wanted the cardstock to show. The candle is stamped on transparent paper, I added double sided tape on the backside and "painted" it with pearl ex powder. Sparkly fantasy fibers.

The baubles are stamped on alco ink coloured glossy paper and cut out. I cut off the hang thing and added a cord instead. Punched out shrink plastic and stamped merry christmas in Swedish. I put down some tulle and heated with the heat gun to get some effects and holes.

I punched out holes and filled them with bees wax and mini beads. I put a stencil over the cardstock and sprayed it with pearl ex. Outlined with use of another stencil with a pen. Twisted some yarn around the swirl.

Rudolph looks a bit sad. Shouldn't he be happy with that gorgeous red flower soft on his nose? I punched out a swirl and with inspiration from Tim Holtz christmas tags, I filled the hole with sepia accent. Rudolph is stamped and embossed on a book page and painted with twinkings H2O. Shrink plastic, coloured with fluid chalk. Bandage coloured with distress ink. Flowers sprayed with a mixture of gum arabic, pearl ex and water. The sparkly thing is fantasy fiber.