Pixels 2 Paper with Tai: Getting Messy with Mixed Media

Hello my crafty friends.  It’s Tai, and I’m back with another fun project.   This time I will be showing you some easy mixed media techniques along with using ‘Moonlit’ printable.  These techniques provide a ‘messy’ or ‘grungy’ look to your projects.  The process does get your hands messy with paint, so be warned.  Lol

I knew I wanted to have stripes of paper from the ‘Moonlit’ collection in a vertical orientation.  So I took the TN pages and cut them into .5 inch stripes of all the patterns I wanted to use.  I selected about 6 patterns, you can choose less or more.  It is up to you.

So a tip I learned the hard way with this project, I forgot to gesso my base paper.  I am using black card stock that I have made 7.25x8 to fit outside the page protectors in my 6x8 One Little Word Album.  I did not gesso my pages and the first step would have gone better if I did.  But I rolled with it and made it work.

For my background I wanted a splatter paint look to peak through the stripes of paper so I took my Dina Wakley gloss sprays in Midnight and in Ocean and sprayed randomly over my large trash can as I did not want the cast off all over my desk.  I then sprayed Oxide Sprays in a purple and blue color.  And on top of all that I finished with white Dina Wakley gloss spray because I knew it would be opaque to sit at the final layout.  This step make my pages extremely wet and and weak and I had to let this dry overnight before I continued.

Now, this step is not for everyone, here I am giving you an example of what the paper stripes weaved on top would look like on just plain black card stock and with the mixed media background.   Either way works.  I just wanted to play with my art supplies further.

I added the stripes with matte gel medium to seal the surface.  I then choose 2 different stencils for add more paint and interest/texture to the background. One was a sort of mermaid scales one and the other was stars.  I used two different colors of paint, a true blue and a deep purple.  I applied the stenciling randomly across both pages.  There is no way to mess this step up.  Most of it gets covered up anyways.  The goal is push back all the patterns in the paper and the harsh edges.  Maybe next time I should have just ripped the paper stripes to get more organic edges.  Something to try the next time.

I decided to use a color 5x7 photo of myself for this layout and I cut the outline of me out.  The photo worked because I happen to be wearing a dark green shirt too and my hair is hard.  I then made a sheet of all the florals in the collection and cut them all out.  I had tons of flowers to use.  I decided on my placement of my photo and added a halo of gray paint all around the edge to have all the flowers stand out more against the background.

Since this project is going into my One Little Word Album, and my word is Balance I wanted to find a way to incorporate my word and I decided on a small poem on velum to add to the other page.  The word Balance was cut out of a patterned paper in the collection and I used more gray paint to blur back the background for it to stand out more.  I adhered my poem and added more of the lovely photos in the corners to hid the adhesive.

And for my final detail and sparkle to my pages I used Cosmic Shimmer Auroa Flakes that were black and silver.  I picked this up at a local scrapbook store.  I used double sided tapes on areas on my layout and then added the flakes on top and varnished them into the tape.  This was a very messy process and do not have the fan on while doing it… it blows the flakes everywhere.  I added it around the pages with my selfie and then around the poem.  It adds tons of sparkle to the page and I absolutely love it.

This process definitely got your hands dirty but it was enjoyable the whole time.  I hope you are brace enough to give a little play time to those art supplies we have in our collection of goodies.

Here is my process video if you’d like to see all these steps and my thought process.

Til next time….~Tai.

TRD Products Used In This Article