DT Project #1 showcasing 7 Dots Studio 9th Wave Collection (by Astrid)

Hello dear Snazzy visitors, lovely to see you here!! Can you believe we are nearly at the end of August??? Scary! Well by now you will know that this month we are featuring the wonderful papers designed by Finnabair. We at Snazzys are all very excited because this coming weekend Finnabair herself will be doing workshops at Snazzys, yippee!!
Anyway, on to my project:

The moment I clapped eyes on these wonderful papers I knew that one of my projects would be a layout of some sort. Now I am not a scrapbooker by any stretch of the imagination, but these papers are so gorgeous, you just cannot go wrong. I decided I would use some of the techniques I learnt from Finn when I did workshops with her last year, and I also wanted to pick up on some of the elements that are printed on the papers themselves, like lace and textured tapes.

So here is a quick step by step of how I did my LO

I cut a piece of mount-board to 12" by 9" and covered it with one of the papers. I then tore some rough strips of another paper and adhered them to my background with gel medium.

I added a thin layer of watered down gesso to blend them into the background and then added some texture paste through some stencils to add some texture. I used both the Hero Arts Stencil,  Boarders that came with our DT kit and some stencils from my stash.

Here's a close up so you can see the texture a bit better:

I added texture both over the background and the paper strips.
Next I gathered some of the bits and pieces I wanted to add to my LO, a photo of course (the one I chose is one of my dad and uncle when they were little boys, I think it was taken in 1914, my dad is the one on the left)

Don't you just love that photo? And yes, for those who like to do their maths, I am quite ancient, but he was quite old when he had me lol....

So here are some of the other bits and bobs I used, chipboard elements, lace, a doily, textured ribbons and tapes, some cheesecloth etc. Flowers will come later. I didn't have many metal embellishments left in my stash so I used mainly chipboard, but Snazzys has a great collection of steam punk and other metal embellishments that would be brilliant for this.
Next I arranged and re-arranged  them onto my LO  until I was more or less happy with the result and also added some flowers lying around in various baskets on my desk. The colours don't matter at all at this stage.

I glued them on with a mix of Cosmic Shimmer glue and gel medium and when it was dry covered everything with several layers of Gesso.

I really quite liked it at this stage, but of course it needed a bit more drama, so out came the sprays. I used a mix of Tattered Angels, Cosmic Shimmer and Dylusions sprays.

Yikes, I don't like this, far too blue. It needs more depth...
Onto the Acrylic paints next, dark brown, black and white. I added dark shadows around the main embellishments and whited out some of the areas that had gone too blue, I also highlighted some of the raised bits again with more white and finally rubbed some Treasure Gold in Pewter to add a few more highlights, - done!
Here you can see some close ups:

And the final result of the whole LO:

Well there you have it, hope you like my LO, not exactly Clean And Simple lol....
Anyway, as you probably know, if you leave a comment on Gillian's first post you're in with a chance to win a fab price, and don't forget to check out the other wonderful projects my teamies have been making with this fantastic collection! I'll be back later on in the week with another little project, so hopefully will see you then.