A Beautiful Morning - Mixed Media Background ScrapFX Style

Hello, Hello!  It is indeed a beautiful morning here.  The sun is shining, birds are singing, and temps are rising!  Dare I say spring is really arriving in WI?  I sure hope so!!

This past weekend a group of fellow ScrapFX DT gals and I had the pleasure of being first up for a new regular feature on the blog - group posts!  Each month a team will be tackling a topic of choice and sharing their takes - our topic of choice?  Mixed Media Backgrounds!!!!

I just really love all these layered bits - I think of this as my little shot of happy!!  This deer and star border die are definitely favs of mine these days and sit out my table ready to be used at any moment.  You can get these yourself at Crop Stop.  Here you can also see some of my fav chippies from ScrapFX like the mini Retro Flower peeking out and the Field of Flower pieces.

In my last post I shared this sneaky peek - lots of layered up goodies, loads of color up top, and texture too!!  Are you curious how it all started?  Well here let me show you!!  

In order to create all this color I only used three watercolors.  Yellow, magenta, and turquoise.  I played with how intensely I added them and used water in various degrees.  Blending colors and knowing what will work together to create what colors is key.  If you're new to using watercolors or blending colors - practice on a scrap piece of paper first and then transfer your knowledge to the piece your wanting to use for a project.

OooLaLa, I love my watercolors and am not quite sure why I had them tucked away for so long.  I used to play with them quite frequently a couple years back.  Then got distracted with something new and poof! they started collecting dust.  So what did exactly did I do to get this look?  Here's the break down for you:

I started off by stenciling the chevron pattern onto to some watercolor paper using modeling paste. I used the ScrapFX Chevron stencil which is not to be mistaken for other stencils that have popped up since - this is the original baby!! :D Once my paste was dry I got busy with my watercolors.  I wanted the color blending I created to match the picture I was using so I happily worked at it until I was satisfied with the results.  This was so beautiful on its own I didn't want to take too much away from it yet it felt like it needed a bit of something - I decided a little stencil stamping was in order.  I grabbed a couple complimentary dark ink colors and my Daisy Garden ScrapFX stencil and added the circular elements to background.  Ahh yes, just enough contrast yet not too distracting.  I also added a bit of glitter glue sparsely over the entire background with my fingers to give additional texture and shine - but alas you cannot tell in the picture.  Someday glitter glue will not elude in me in pictures - ha! - until then you will have to trust me this is beautiful.

This finished page is actually for my PL album.  Its a shot of a late winter sunrise and I thought it would make a pretty addition as a divider page between months since that is kind of how my album is/will be set up.

With my background complete I was able to build up my layers of paper, chippies, textiles, and picture to finish off my page.  You can see how rich the colors become with the addition of the darker papers below it.  Cool effect.  I also found it was so easy to pull this page together once the background was done.  Not much was needed as the picture and background were really the focal points.  A few of my fav chippies here and there and it was a done one.  Love that.

Well, thanks so much for dropping by today and I do hope you were inspired to try out something new for your own backgrounds.  Have a lovely day and I'll be back again soon with something else new for you to try along with some more PL shares.  

Take good care!