Distressed Hummingbird

Hello again eP friends!! Starla here again for project number 3 as a guest DT this month!!

This past week has been one of those weeks.  You know, kids having project boards due, games to attend and packing the oldest kids for music tour.

Yeah.  Pretty much the type of schedule that zaps thoughts of creating, LOL!!  So this week, I wanted  needed to keep things a bit more simple.  This week, I did a bit of sketching with distressed water coloring!

One of my creative goals for this year is to get back to my roots in art and include more sketching, drawing, and painting in my  projects.  I've so enjoyed the projects eP's own Micki  has been doing on her lunch hours.  I decided to pull out all those accumulated but unused (cough cough) Distress Stains  and the couple of new Distress Paints that I just happened to have jump into my cart!

I started with a pad of watercolor paper.  I used a Versa Mark stamp pad on top of TCW's  Maraposa stencil then covered the wet ink with clear embossing powder. 

After melting the embossing powder, I randomly applied Distress Stains to my paper and used a wet watercolor brush to blend the inks together.

I spritzed my hand with water and flicked the droplets onto the stains to create more texture. 

Note:  In hind sight, I would either sketch out my page first or emboss after I had the other elements on the page.  My hummingbird had to be placed a bit too far to the left so as not to cover my butterfly!!

Claudine Hellmuth's Studio Gesso was used to white out the basic hummingbird body.  A combination of Distress Stains and Distress Paints  were used to paint the body of the hummingbird. I used TCW's Mini Circle Explosion Stencil  with a combination of Distress Inks and Distress Stains to add some texture onto the belly.

This really became a mixed media project as I then used the Distress Stains, Paints, Inks with pastel pencils and charcoal pencils to add more depth and shading.  

Distress Stain was also used to create the "flowers".

I really liked how the Distress Stains  could mimic the characteristics of traditional watercolors.  I was also pleasantly surprised in that the Distress Paints  are different from "regular" acrylic paints.  I will be brushing up more on those rusty sketching and painting skills combining these mediums more in the future!!

FYI: Distress Stains used: Fired Brick, Shabby Shutters, Peeled Paint, Scattered Straw, Wild Honey, Broken China.  Distress Inks used: Aged Mahogany, Faded Jeans, Fired Brick.  Distress Paints used: Peeled Paint, Broken China.

'Till next week..........