Grab your paints and get going

The Counterfeit Kit Challenge mini-challenge #3 is up and it's all about the colouring. Crayons, pencils, markers, felt-tip pens, paint - whatever is your colour of choice. The gorgeous photo of Crayola crayons on the challenge blog post (here) reminds me of a layout I created last week as part of LOAD about my wonderful birthday present way back when I was 9 (post here). A box of 64 Crayola crayons with the integrated sharpener - I was so in love with this box. I think I need to get myself some more!

Anyway, onto the challenge in hand. I opened up my February kit, Record, and looked for inspiration. I'm not a doodler or a freehand artist so I was hoping to find something in there that could be altered in some way. This paper jumped out at me as something with an open pattern that could be interesting.

I took out my gold acrylic paint and watered it down a bit so that it was quite runny and less a solid colour. I then used a fine paint brush and picked out some elements of the pattern to lightly cover in gold.

As it was quite thin paint, some of it dried quite quickly so I gave it a few minutes and then sprinkled some gold glitter over it. The glitter only stuck to parts of the painted area which gave it a more random effect.

To match up the gold and glitter on the paper, I did one of current favourite techniques and splatted some diluted glue for some glitter and also some diluted paint across the cardstock.

My end result was a lot of fun and used up quite a lot of bits and pieces from my kit.

February kit, Record, layout #5

Now, got to dash. I need to track down some Crayola. A giant box :-)

All that glitters...

Time for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge mini-challenge #2 and it's a good'un. We are all about the glitter today and you know how sparkle makes me happy :-)

I buy a fair amount of ready glittered items - letters, embellishments or papers - but it's not often that I think about getting the pretty stuff out to add to my pages myself. So this was an even better challenge for me as it got me covered in the stuff and I found that I loved the result.

I had a rather gorgeous sheet of Authentique paper in my Resolve kit and I especially loved the swirly lines in each of the corners.

I decided to turn this into a counterfeit MME sheet of paper by adding some swirls of glitter to some of those lines - counterfeiting the counterfeit, ever the over-achiever ;-) I just followed some of the lines with a glue pen and added the glitter. The pen dries quite quickly so I did it a line or two at a time and then once it was fully dry I went over the whole area with a brush so that the loose glitter was removed.

After that, the layout came together easily. I added in some yellow vellum to my kit for my butterflies, the brown thickers and some yellow doilies that I saw in the local supermarket and couldn't resist for my kit. I've taken to just grabbing the first photo that comes to hand and making it work in some way and this is a perfect example. I just saw this photo and knew I needed to use it as a reminder.

I can't do a layout at the moment without a loopy thread/twine embellishment and a banner so of course, these are both here too. And there's a nice spot there for one of Helen's sweet hand-made fabric flowers - perfect!

What will you be adding glitter to this week?