Daydreamers & Stargazers | Elsie Robinson

Hey everyone, it's Elsie popping back on the blog today, and one of my New Year's resolutions is to be brave and incorporate some mixed media into my scrapbooking - haha! 

So this is definitely not a life-changing New Year's resolution by any means, but I always like to make sure that I am pushing and challenging myself creatively. And boy, does painting challenge me...!

I've always found it difficult to incorporate mixed media into my style of scrapbooking, and if I'm being honest a lot of previous mixed media layouts have ended up in the bin - eek!

But this layout was so much fun to make; I feel like I've finally figured out a way I can make mixed media work for me. Let me talk you through what I did...

I was really inspired by this month's Kinsley Embellishment kit, I loved the glitter, gold foiling and the galactic colour tones in the kit, and that combo was my starting point.

In the Pink Paislee Moonstruck collection there are some embellishments with script on them, so I decided to use a script stencil from my stash and start my mixed media process using that with some modelling paste.

Once that was dry I used watercolours in dark blues, pinks and purples with a very wet brush so the colours could blend and mix together, to get that Galaxy look I was after. I then splattered some white acrylic ink with a small brush to make it look like some tiny stars.

And honestly, I was left with a 12x12 piece of paper that looked like a mess!! Albeit a very pretty mess, but a mess I felt very daunted to make a layout with.

I decided to grab another piece of white paper, draw and cut a half-moon and star design, hand-stitch around them and back it with the mixed media page. 

And I loved the way that looked! Being able to control what parts of the background you could see and getting my beloved white space back, made the mixed media so much easier to work with.

I went to town clustering the embellishments around my photo. Also by firstly placing the translucent Pink Paislee Moonstruck stickers onto white paper and then fussy-cutting them out, meant that I was able to place them wherever I wanted and use them like die-cuts.

The wooden stars from the Main kit are so pretty and such a fun shape, but to make them work with this layout, I painted them with some white gesso and sprayed them with some gold ink. I love their distressed look, it really complemented and echoed the gold flecks in the cork title 'dream'.

Thanks for joining me today, and I hope you're inspired to try and work some mixed media into your projects!

Have a wonderful New Years everyone, and I'll see you again in 2017!

- Elsie x