Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Wednesday Women

Let's give a warm welcome to Rhea Freitag as out Guest Artist on Wednesday Women!!
 Rhea is sharing a tutorial
 Craft Foil Embossing Technique with Gesso!
As our Guest Artist Rhea can place this logo on her blog!


Here is Rhea's tutorial!
I wanted to play with my art supplies today and thought I would share with you a little bit of my exploration.  I am facinated with metal.  There are many craft foils now on the market, both Spellbinders and Ranger have nice options and they also have sticky backs for easy adhesion. 

I started my creative process by embossing my foil with my Big Shot.  I embossed a few, as I planned to experiment a bit with my materials. 


Next, I gave each sheet a nice coat of Gesso.  I love Ultrecht as it is super thick and provides great texture, but any brand will do.  Be sure to let this layer dry completely.  You can cheat with a heat gun, but be super careful, gesso will bubble very easly!

Now it was time to play.  I added color to each of my pieces with stains, distress inks as well as alcohol inks. 


Then comes the fun part sanding.  This gesso was really thick, so I had to use some elbow grease to get the metal to show through again. 


I was so excited about the results, that apparently I forgot to photograph the three finished piececs!  Sorry folks.  I did have one scrap to photograph.  Even though I brought it up to daylight, it is still hard to see the wonderful texture. 
 
The birdcage is cut from the brown gear sheet using Tim Holtz’s Birdcage die.  The background is the swirls that were colored with stains.  I added depth to the background sheet with a bit of rub and buff before I adhered it to a coaster.  The bird was cut from the script sheet.  I added a bit more ink as well as some patina to make the letters stand out more and give it a bit more contrast.  Lots of little embellishments finish out this nice little altered art piece.  

Here you can see the texture I created a lot better.  I love how when it is sanded down, sometimes it reveals the gesso and sometimes the metal.  I hope this post inspires you to get out your materials and experiment a bit. 
Cheers,

Rhea

10 comments:

Bunnyfreak said...

Very cool.

Kathy Eddy said...

I love how this turned out!

Dorothy said...

Fantastic!!!

Unknown said...

what a fun idea! great work!

Robyn said...

Wonderful tutorial!! I am sooo inspired. Thank you Rhea. Great work as usual

Donna H. said...

I am going to try this later today. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

www.creativepointe.blogspot.com said...

Great tut Rhea!

Anita Houston The Artful Maven said...

Brilliant!!! Love, love, love metal! These are fabulous! I love all the different prints on the metals as well. Thanks for the tutorial!

Cindi E said...

Great technique, Rhea, thanks for sharing with us!

KatBug said...

Rhea, Again, another amazing project! Super cool technique I want to try too. Thank you.