A little play in the Den - Gesso rules!

I managed to get up to the Den this afternoon in the sunshine, after a couple of days of sorting out eyes - check up at hospital on Friday  (got the all clear to have eye test for new specs) and also got told that they were going to do the other eye in the next few months - that was a surprise as everything I had read said the local authority were only paying for one eye!

I managed to get a cancelled appointment at the optician yesterday, so am now on countdown to getting new specs .... can't wait!   Couldn't do any crafting as such miserable weather and so dark!

Anyway back to the Den ..... I made a start on my challenge project.  First picture shows the box.  I applied some texture past to the "pages" and the painted on some gold gesso.  I also did the inside, but that may not stay like that.  the rest of the book box got an application of black gesso.

White gesso on  3 of the 6 ATC greyboards

I mentioned that I had the idea of doing double-sided ATC cards.  So I applied white gesso to one side and black to the other.

I also had a play with one of the MDF skills I have. I was going to paint it with flowers etc in The Day of the Dead vain, but decided to play with the side with the markings on first to see how it would turn out,  which was a bit of a challenge as eyes are still a bit iffy until I get the new specs, as cannot see detail that easily - or more to the point I can't see the end of the paintbrush!  Here is the result, just painted with white acrylic and a little black gesso.  I didn't like the black initially as it was to blak, but a little blending with some of the white, water, and in some cases that good old tool called a finger, I was pretty happy with the result.

I have painted white acrylic on the reverse side - so that will have the Day of the Dead flowers etc painted on it.

Experimenting

I had some new scrumptious goodies to play with this week.  Gold Gesso, Silver Gesso, Clear Gesso, Light and Fluffy Modelling Paste and Shimmery Goodness!   Yes they do sound exciting don't they.  I love them all, and am sharing an experiment with some of them,

A complete experiment as I had no idea what I wanted to do.  To do a fair trial I used plain MDF boards as a canvas (see last picture).

I painted the larger of the two boards with the gold gesso.  It covered really well and dried so quickly.  I thought this was probably due to the fact that it was on MDF - so I gave it another coat - this dried just as quickly - amazing.  I also did a quick test on some card and yes it dried very quickly on that too,

I also have some new distress oxides, so I decided to see how they reacted on the gold gesso.   I used a tree stencil from my Clarity Stamp Club and randomly stamped it across the board, moving it as necessary to cover the area, using twisted citron, peacock feathers and salty ocean.  I moved the stencil to give some shadows.

(with apologies for the shadow of me taking photo)

I applied the silver gesso to the smaller board, and using part of another Clarity Stencil - The rose, I applied the Light and Fluffy Modeling paste through it with a palette knife.    This too dried very quickly,   I then applied Distress Oxides again - using picked raspberry and seedless preserves, to give it some shading.

The small board was then mounted on the larger board.

Below is a photo of what I started with:

MDF board