A splash of paint

First up - thanks to Wilma for letting me indulge in an idea. This layout is obviously not product heavy - but I wanted to talk about inspiration and how you can source ideas for layouts from the strangest places.

DS2 has this shirt he loves. For him, it is a little out there - a bit more grunge/emo than my conservative, straight-laced, prudish little boy normally wears. Personally - I love the shirt, it is dark yet bright, funky and a little wicked, all at once. I love the 'sketched' feel to it and I really wanted to do a layout that incorporated the design elements of the shirt.

So the concept for the layout comes from the shirt and I have tried to keep the design simple - since the splashed/sketched feel of the shirt gives a 'quick' feel to the art elements.

Black cardstock for the background and only the 2 colours – fluro yellow and green. This means making the photo a ‘focal b/w’ – that is, black and white other than for a specified area (the design on the shirt). I spent some time trying to get the ‘sketched’ look to the skulls – I tried painting them, scanning and printing onto acetate etc – but the only method that worked well was stitching. Lucky for me, DMC comes in fluoro colours as well as all the normal ones.

You need to trace over the pattern on the shirt with some baking paper (or real tracing paper if you have it) and then use it as a template to punch out the stitching holes. In this case it doesn’t matter if the stitching is a little uneven or rough and ready – it matches the theme.

Note: if you look carefully at the left eye you can see something I learnt – some of the stitches are not there anymore – it seems DMC thread does not like heat guns all that much – so be careful if you use one where stitching is.

You can also get a close up look at the paint I used for the ‘splashes’. The only company that made a ‘limey/fluoro’ green was Luminarte – the people who make Twinkling H2O’s – and this is their Keylime (which is the same as the Twink one of the same name). I used an eyedropper to splodge the paint into the eye and then used my heat gun to dry it into a textured blobbish mess. Over this I put a little Kindyglitz and again used my heat gun to dry it. There is a real 3D look to it – that does not come out in the photo as well as it shows up in real life.

I did the same to get the splatter look – but I let this dry naturally for most of the time as it splatters a little too much if you use the heat gun too close.

The alphas are some old ones I have had in my stash for a looooooooong time. So long I have no idea who they are by. To colour them I used the Twinkling H2O’s version of the lime colour, as it is thicker in texture and less likely to make a mess of the chippy. More Kindyglitz and a little heat gun. To finish them off I edged the chippy in some black ink – just to grunge them up a little more.

Still wanting to keep the journaling simple, I used the computer to print it out onto strips of a matching patterned paper from the BG Lemonade range.

Lol – and of course all this simplicity took simply forever to do.

So have a good look around you for inspiration – it might just be staring you in the face.

Materials – 123 Store

Bazzill
- Raven
Versa Color Ink Cube
– Black (oos)
Kindyglitz
- Crystalina
Basic Grey – Lemonade
- Lime Cooler (oos)

Materials – Own Stash

Luminarte
- Twinkling H2O’s – Key Lime
- Radiant Rain – Key Lime
DMC thread – fluoro green and fluoro yellow
Chipboard alphas - unknown