Video Tutorial: Grungy Gears Background Technique
February 07, 2015
This month's Pop it Ups Designer Challenge has two parts. Here are the instructions I provided the team and our guest designer:
FEBRUARY - Artsy or Cutesy - Which way will you go? Feel free to do both. Cards should lean very artsy fartsy, with inks and textures and quotes about the soul (or whatever) OR very cutesy, like puppies and kittens and rainbows and sprinkles. Post your creations Monday & Tuesday, February 9th and 10th. My post will be on Wednesday, February 11th.
Many of the team is tackling both halves of the challenge and I decided to do the same, focusing on the Cutesy side of the challenge for the video tutorial (The cutesy video tutorial will be posted next week on the 11th) and making the Arsty side of the challenge just for fun, since when I work in this genre I tend to experiment with mixed media until I like something - much harder for me to reproduce what I did and teach it on video.
And so I came up with an artistic bathtub card! (I know, crazy, right?)
The front of the card features the grungy gears (and clock) background technique and then I ripped a tear into the background to allow butterflies to "escape".
The card's interior features the Bathtub die, cut from another grungy gears background, attached to the Lorna Label, and more escaping butterflies, this time from a key hole cut into the tub.
When I posted this card to the team's private group I got some questions about how I did the background technique and I figured that at least that part of things was easy to reproduce, so here's a video tutorial for how I did the background for the card's front and for the bathtub's texture:
What I like about this particular background technique is that it doesn't require much else. For my card front I added just a few elements - more gears die cut from black cardstock and layered together to create chipboard-like elements. I dotted the tops with a silver leafing pen and then embossed with black powder to mostly cover the silver. The metal clock that is layered over the "lump" clock is from my stash, as is the metal flower brad. The clock hands come with the clock die. To make the numbers more visible I used my fingernail to scrape away the black paint on the numbers, revealing the silver shelf liner.