That's Crafty!: Portrait Hera by Amanda Southern

Hi Everyone,

I have been playing again with one of the That’s Crafty! substrates, this time the 8” x 8” white/greyboard.

As you can see I ended up framing my work

Here’s what I did:-

Starting with a piece of That’s Crafty! 8” x 8” grey/white boards I first gave it a coat of gesso, as I was working with water it gives a great surface to move the colour around on.

I then took the XXL stamp “Portrait Hera” by Carabelle Studio. These stamps are so large they come on their own acrylic mount which is A4 in size. Due to the large stamping surface of these stamps I sometimes find it tricky to get a perfect print but I have found a work around that I also love the effect of. That workaround is that I stamped it using Dylusions black paint. I brayered a thin layer of the back paint evenly over the stamp and then instead of taking the stamp to the paper I took the paper to the stamp carefully laying the board over my brayered up stamp I could then apply pressure to the back of the board to transfer the image. Just be careful that you don’t move the board prior to lifting it off as you will smudge your image. I find I hold my breath at that point. Whilst your image is drying clean your stamp immediately to remove all the paint before it dries. The other advantage of stamping with paint is that you can use most mediums with it and don’t have to worry that you’ve used the right ink pad.

So with everything cleaned up I set about colouring my image, I used a selection of Distress pens both directly onto my image and by scribbling onto my craft mat and watering down and applying with a water brush. I really thinned down the colours as I wanted to create lots of drips on my piece. To add I bit more definition I went in with a couple of Spectrum noir pencils. The following pictures show the before and after of adding the pencils.

without pencil

with pencil

I decided to put it in an 8” x 8” black box frame and wanted to add some words. To make the piece a little 3D I decided to stamp my sentiment onto the glass of the frame.

I heat embossed my sentiment onto the glass that I had removed from the frame.

Stamping on glass is very slippy so I have to be honest, it took me a few goes to get a clean stamped image before I applied the fine black embossing powder. It took a lot longer than normal to get the powder to melt with the heat gun which I am guessing is because the glass was cold. If you try this be careful as the glass gets very hot.