Inspiration Wednesday: Seek

The current lesson from Donna Downey's Inspiration Wednesday included some serious play with adding and removing paint. This creates some lovely, distressed texture layers. Of course, it might happen that you cover up something that you like and end up with something less pleasing, but the risk is worth taking. I took some photos along the way, so I can show you the initial stages.

Following Donna's prompt, I started out with a teal background and used gel medium to stencil the butterfly motif and the word SEEK. Donna actually used Golden's tar gel, but when I tried Liquitex's string gel (which is supposed to be the same thing) it didn't really work. I got good results with the gel medium, though. The idea is to mask part of the background with the gel to allow the underlying colour to show through the subsequent layers. This is what my page looked like halfway through the process:

In the next step - again following Donna's prompts - I added raw umber and quinacridone nickel azo gold in a similar distressed fashion and ended up with the final look. Along the way I added some masking tape, stamping, a hidden message under my flap, drippage and of course the obligatory torn and stapled tag, which is one of Donna's signature elements.

Thanks for visiting! Wishing you all a lovely weekend!