Maxine Jones Design: Flutterby Butterflies

Good morning fellow crafters, and thank you for stopping by! I am very excited to be able to offer inspiration today for the IndigoBlu Blog Challenge "Flutterby" theme. Click here to head back to the blog challenge so you can visit all the wonderful inspirational pieces we've done for you!

I have a few butterfly stamps from IndigoBlu and they are all equally beautiful - however, I had this little frame and wanted to do an ombré effect with the IndigoBlu Cottage Acrylic paints and then overlay in black - to really make it pop! I even left in my overstamp lines and I was a little heavy handed, but I do sometimes like to make it look a little handmade with a couple of human errors (because I'm not perfect!).

To start, I took the IndigoBlu Script stamp, and, using Blue Hawaii StazOn, stamped the back (it took two to fill my little piece of card, which I had pre-cut to fit into the frame. I used my heatgun to ensure the ink was complete dry/set.

The colours I have used on the background sheet of card are Postbox Red, Burning Bonfire and Banana Custard. I put some paint onto a paper palette and then sprayed with few squirts of water. I used a brush to apply to my card, over the ink - I started light and went darker and blended the paints to get the graduated effect. As I had applied water, thereby thinning the paint, plus used a brush to thinly apply, you can see the script through the paint and it really tones down that into the background.

I took the butterfly stamp from the IndigoBlu Nature 1 A5 stamp set (I love this stamp so much!) and used black StazOn - very simple, yet effective over the top of that background.

Next, the frame needed pimping up! It was a simple wooden frame, and had been painted with black IndigoBlu Gee-Sso Good. I carefully removed the frame back and glass, then ripped up some strips of regular nose tissue and coated the frame with IndigoBlu Slap-It-On. I applied the tissue so to leave it a little wrinkled - I'm not going for a smooth tissue technique here, I'm going for texture! Apply and then go over the tissue with the Slap-It-On, and encourage wrinkles, even little tears here and there. Overlap in places to really add to that texture. It will look pretty awful at this stage! Leave to dry!

My next step was to give a really good coat of the Gee-Sso Good in black. I only needed to do one coat, but you may need to touch up a couple of areas, as I know I always miss the odd bit! Leave to dry once again!

Lastly, using the IndigoBlu Metallic Cottage Acrylic Paint, in Goldfinger, dry brush, using a sort of flicking motion with a large stiff brush. The size 20 Gold Line brush (that also comes with the mannequin kit) is perfect for this! (I have about 3 or 4 of these brushes now, as they are in constant use!!) The idea here is to try to just catch the raised 'wrinkles' of the tissue paper, but however you do this will work, as it really makes that texture pop!

And that's it! Put the frame back together and voila! One very lovely little Flutterby Butterfly piece of framed artwork! I hope you feel inspired to create your own entry for this - there is always the chance to win some amazing stamps!