Hello American Crafts friends! It’s Terhi here to inspire you with a lovely mixed media layout. Sit back, relax and enjoy!
One of my favorite new releases from American Crafts is Vicki Boutin’s Let’s Wander collection. It’s a travel themed collection of papers, embellishments, and most importantly mixed media products. Vicki herself is known for her passion to create colorful and simple mixed media layouts. I personally think even her sunny positive attitude has been preserved into the bottles of paints and pastes. You just can’t feel sad when paint covers your fingers!
Creating mixed media can be scary if you haven’t tried it before. Some say it’s almost terrifying to start with a blank sheet of paper. You can find pre-made mixed media backgrounds from Vicki’s lines, but if you want to give it a try yourself, I’ve got three tips for you start with.
Tip One- Limit the area you play on.
I’ve been lucky enough to teach mixed media scrapbooking for several years, and the most common fear that students have is about the size of the scrapbook paper.
My answer for this is to draw a loose circle with a regular pencil around the photograph you’re scrapbooking. The size of the circle should be slightly bigger than your photograph(s), and when you focus on your painting, stamping or spraying over the circle, you’ll also have enough space to let your eyes rest. Covering the full 12” x 12” paper with different medias usually makes the page too heavy and busy! Limiting your space is the simplest trick for getting over this fear.
Tip Two: Create an acceptable order for the layers.
Imagine you’re in a forest. You can see trees, leaves on them, some smaller trees and bushes, and vegetation below them. The lowest is the earth.
Now think about your project as a forest when you’re starting to build up your mixed media layers. The paper is like your earth. Stamped images are like the grass. On top of these two you can add some texture paste or paint through a stencil which is like the bushes are in the forest. Finally, the papers, embellishments and photographs are your trees. They are the main thing you can see in the forest!
Tip Three: Practice makes perfect!
You can never go wrong when creating mixed media, but if you prefer clean and crisp images when stamping or crisp edges for your stencil work, all you need is a lot practicing. Don’t forget to have an open mind while practicing! Discovering is a big part of the journey!
I hope that these simple tips will help you dabble in the art of mixed media. It’s so much fun!
Products used: Let’s Wander patterned papers Sunshine and Smiles (355301), Day Tripping (355302), Picture Perfect (355304), Escape (355308), Fly Away with Me (355309), Chasing Stars (355310), Let’s Wander Stamps and Dies Set (352261), Let’s Wander Stencils Starstruck (354112), Let’s Wander Mini Envelopes with Cards (355332), Let’s Wander Embellishment Pack (355340), Let’s Wander Color Pop Paints Metallics (355343), Let’s Wander Prism Glaze (355344), Palette Knife (348092), American Crafts Foundations Media Paper (343917), American Crafts Art Basics Sketch and Draw Pencil Kit (354850), American Crafts Brush Markers (357028), Sticky Thumb Dots (340272), Sticky Thumb Runner (342039).
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