Gesso, Paint and Bling - A Craft Stamper Tutorial

HI. I have done a few of these little hearts lately as I picked up a bag of them damaged from my local nursery after christmas. I always have a few emails asking questions about them so I thought I would do a  little tutorial about how they are decorated and add a few photo's along the way. Hope you like it.

A full list of items used and their suppliers are at the end of this post, and I shall be giving this particular heart away to one person who comments on this post, it would be lovely if you became a blog follower to if you don't already follow me.
So onto business. The whole thing with this heart is to build up layes of colour and texture, so it may seem as if you are just covering up what you have previously done, but all the layers do add to the finished apperance so just bear with it.

This is the basic heart, after taking this photo I gave it a sand with a sanding block to remove the red wording from it's front.

I painted it with Fresco Finish paint, I just put on small blobs of colour and then blended them as I covered the heart with them using a bit of cut and dry foam, this way the colours don't tend to mix together so much and you end up with a more mottled finish. I then applied Crackle glaze to the painted heart using an old store card, you only need a very thin layer of this and you usually end up seeming to scrape off as much as you have put on, but if it takes to long to dry its a sign that you have applied to much of it, so next time try to use a bit less.

I then applied quite a thin a coat of fresco paint over the crackle glaze, because I plan to stamp and colour my images directly onto the heart I have used a very neutral colour for this. I dried this with my heat gun.

I gave this a coat of multi medium to seal the surface a bit and then stamped my images directly onto the heart, I also stamped them onto post it notes, and cut them out to use as masks.


Mask off all the stamping and using the same 3 colour paints as for your base coat, dry brush colour onto your heart, dry brush very gently, as you don't want dense colour, the idea is to add a hint of colour as a background. I put a small spot of each colour on my craft mat and applied it with a stiff brush, with very gently strokes to avoid to much colour going on at once so I could build up the colour where I wanted it.

Leave your masks in place and with the Friendship back ground stamp fill in the background. I used a stamp positioner to get the Big word of "friendship" from the plate in the position I wanted it on the heart.

Still leaving your masks in place, lay a stencil over the heart and using the store card scrape gesso through the mask, again not going for total coverage of the gaps in the stencil, to help achieve this put very little gesso on your card and really scrape around what you do have, it will seem like you are working with hardly anything and scraping off as much as you are putting on, but you are only adding tiny elements to the background with this. I tried to avoid getting it on the word "friend" that I place beside the rabbits. heat dry.

Still with your masks in place dry brush a Fresco translucent paint over the whole background. I now heat set this and when it was dry I removed my masks. I now painted my images using Claudine Hellmuth paints. I ran a black dabber round the edges and highlighting the word "friend" with glossy accents and added stickles to the rabbits crowns.

I now thought "BLING" and I knew what I wanted but it had to be subtle, so I decided to run some glossy accents randomly over the heart in a downward direction avoiding any images and then sprinkled some beadazzels over it all.
This has ended up with a lovely subtle texture to it, the gesso is just slightly proud of the background and with the translucent paint added over it, the white is not to stark and it all blends in really well.


Items I used (with links to suppliers)

Rubber stamps: CI 372, CI 370 (bunting) ,CI 052
Fresco paints & Crackle glaze
Claudine Hellmuth Paints
Stickles
Archival Ink Pad
Beadazzels

Thank you for looking and don't forget If you fancy owning this, please comment below, and it would be lovely if you started to follow me to.

I am happy to post worldwide.

Carol x