A Charming Victorian Wall Shelf

Detail can be a thing of beauty. I have always loved hand painted details on furniture and combining that with the wonderfully scrolly Victorian Wall Shelf Miniature is a match made in heaven!
I love working in 1:12 scale and this is a perfect piece for the WIP doll's house I have been slowly working on for about a year. The beautiful and graceful scroll work on this piece inspired me to enhance the already lovely shape and add pretty gold details.

 Here's where I started out....

Glued the bits together. Make sure you put your brackets in right way up! Just sayin'......

I gave it a good coat of gesso and then a coat of white acrylic paint.

I have a nice little collection of old watch faces and wanted to use one for the circle that was just crying to be a clock.
I chose one and dry fit it into the hole, then drew a circle around it to mark where the edges were on the circle.

And yes! This next picture is meant to be upside down. The shelf part of the clock would have inhibited me from doing a consistent paint job on the details, so I flip the piece over and did my rough guide/sketch of my design....

And then began to paint it on. I used Lumiere Metallic Acrylic in Sunset Gold and a #4 round brush. I like this brush because it holds it pointy tip and allows for fine lines and it's stiff enough that I can paint little swirly circles and dots.

I am right-handed, so I paint from the left to the right, that way I don't drag my hand through any wet paint.
Here is what the completed gold paint looks like.

I wanted to age it up a bit...the white is a little too bright for me, so I used a little water and Quinachrodone Gold to 'yellow' the white and make the gold look just a bit richer.
Quinac Gold is a semi translucent acrylic paint that I use a lot either by itself or with a little black to give the appearance of age or grime to a piece. (this is a variation on something I learned from the amazing and very funny Michael deMeng)

I smoodged around a bit of the quinac and water and then wiped it down with a bit of damp paper towel. I reapplied as I need to to get the color I wanted.
It goes without saying that you want your detail painting to be completely dry before you do this!

 The finished shelf!
And with some fun goodies displayed on it...

Supplies:
Gypsy Soul Laser Cuts
Victorian Wall Shelf Miniature

Additional supplies from Alpha Stamps
Even tinier books-set of 12
Three Miniature Vases
Small Mulberry Blossoms
Amber Candy Dish Set

Acrylic paints
Gesso
Glue

Thank you for stopping by!

Bronzino Beauties

I love the portraits of Bronzino. He lived his whole life in Florence (1503-1572) and was mainly the court painter for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who happened to be a very powerful Medici, so there are many Bronzino portraits of the Medici family scattered throughout museums around the world. I particularly like his portraits of women. They are so finely done, rich and detailed and studying the faces of these ladies, I can really see their personalities come through the paint. And the jewelry.....holy 24 karats, Batgirl!
Let's just say Bronzino had embellishing down to, well , a fine art. (see what I did there?)

Here's how I started out....
I began with my usual routine of giving everything a good coat of gesso. Sigh....I do love gesso.
I wanted the Triptych-Tower Top to stand out in contrast with the color I was planning on using, so I painted everything that was going to show, black.

I began playing with the layouts of the ladies, moving things around to the spaces I felt they looked best, keeping in mind that there were going to be a bunch of contrasting watercolor flowers behind them.

I also connected the back pieces together using my favorite linen hinging tape and painted it black.

I painted the back completely black after the front dried.

After fussing around with composition some more, I decided that the black background was a bit too heavy and needed some relief, so I painted the top part of the black background gold where the pierced top of the towers show through.

After gluing down my cut-out images of the ladies and flowers to the back side of the front frame, I then glued the whole shebang on to the corresponding backs. I piled some weight on the piece to make sure they dried flat.

 I 'beefed up' the jewelry the ladies are wearing by using Liquid pearls and adding flat back crystals. Then I painted some gold detailing around each frame, added some metal embellishments and gave it a good few hours to dry well before I touched up any gold paint. I also made sure that there were no bits of white peeking out of the side of the piece and touched up the black where I need to.

SUPPLIES:
Triptych-Tower Top


Additional supplies:
Acrylic paint
Gesso
Liquid Pearls
Bronzini Portraits
Floral collage sheets
Metals embellishments
Linen Hinging tape
Crystals

Thank you for stopping by!

A Steampunk Card for a Friend

I think that I had this ambition to get as much as I could on an 8" x 8" card and with the help of gorgeous  gslcuts embellishments I was able to succeed.
                                                                         
                                                                        

 

I used an 8" x 8" scalloped card that I had in my stock and cut a piece of creative expressions foundation card in white, slightly smaller than the card, making the curved corners to match.

 I used creative expressions gilding polish (colour heather) to cover the whole of the white piece of card, then embossed this with cogs & gears creative embossing folder. After I had embossed it I went over it very lightly with silver dream gilding polish.
Next I chose which embellishments I wanted to use, which were:- gears shape set, butterfly of gears, heart of gears, dragons shape set, hot air balloons net style and word elements 1. 

                                                                   

  I also had some flowers in my stock and thought they would look good too.
I covered all the embellishments in white gesso and let them dry, then coloured them with different coloured distress inks and some with gilding polish.
The colours that I used on the embellishments I also added to the background card using the hot air balloon as a template, but did some "splodges" as well.

                                                           

I had the flowers in my stash so stuck these in two corners then took the larger embellishments and placed these where I thought they looked good. 
Before sticking the heart on I threaded some ribbon around the top and stuck it to the card, and the larger gears set I stuck on myself, however, the small pieces of gears I just put in my hand, held them above the card and let them drop. I stuck them to the card where they had landed so that I didn't end up doing a uniformed pattern.
I added two heart pins from my stash to the top of the butterfly to form antennae, and added the friends word in a frame to the top corner.

                                                           

Gslcuts items used:-Dragon shape set
                                     Butterfly of gears
                                     Heart of gears
                                     Hot air balloons net style
                                     Gears shape set
                                     Word elements 1.
Other items used:- Creative embossing folder, cogs & gears
                                    Creative expressions foundation card
                                    Creative expressions gilding polish
                                     Distress ink (any make)