Wooden Heart...

Hello again!
My last post was all about the stencils on your mixed media pieces, this one is all about the stamping! I thought I'd share some of the ways I use stamps in my work, and just to change things up a little, this time I'm using a 3D wood piece rather than a flat bit of card!

The wooden heart is one of my 'keep your eyes open you never know where you might find something cool' purchases, it started off like this..

I covered the whole thing with a couple of coats of Gesso, then roughly coloured it with Pool Adirondack Paint Dabber. The first lot of stamping is done with white paint (or gesso if you still have some on the desk!)

I've used a dot background stamp, and a star, as you can see. Paint is great to stamp with when you don't have to have a 100% perfect image, bits missing here and there work wonderfully for background layers! Don't forget to clean the stamps straight away, if the paint dries you'll never get it off!
Next I edged the heart with some Watermelon Adirondack paint, and added more dots too!

All my stamps so far have been unmounted, and I've used them like that, no block. This is the best way to get random, tiny areas of stamping, and of course if the stamp is flexible it can go round corners! Don't forget to stamp the edges!

Next, I moved on to stamping with ink, as I wanted my lines to be a little crisper. Black ink and a mesh/grid stamp to be precise. Again, do the edges too!

All this direct to substrate stamping is all well and good if you're not after a perfect image, but if you are, ( and especially if the substrate doesn't have a nice flat surface) then we need to try a different trick.
Stamping onto tissue is a wonderful way of transferring an image without losing any clarity whatsoever, and once its on, it looks like you DID stamp it directly!
Stamp the image onto a scrap of white tissue....

Then glue it to the piece. I've tried many many glues for this, but I still swear by Mod Podge! You need a layer both under and over the image, make sure it it firmly smoothed all over...

You can go round corners with this technique too...

Once its on, it looks really messy and white..

But around 3-4 hours later, hey presto the glue is transparent!

One of the very 'me' things to do is add a black and white stamped image to things. Lots of people colour the images in, I prefer not to!

LOVE this little Stampotique lady!
Glue her on...

and that's nearly everything. My final touches were a Dymo-ed word and some black pom pom yarn through the hanger..

I hope you like my project today, I'll be back soon with another!
love Trish xxxx