Create Inside a Frame - A Vintage Journey

Hello Friends!
This month at A Vintage Journey, the talented Julia has chosen 'Create Inside a Frame' for our September challenge.
Julia says 'we would like you to create something inside a frame. Whatever you use, show us how you have incorporated a frame on your vintage, shabby, mixed media, art journalling, industrial or steampunk project!'

This started off as an experiment using the new Distress Grit Paste by Tim Holtz and comparing it to Ranger's Texture Paste. I wanted to see how they took colour.
I am not going to show the steps for the frame, it is so easy to do and there are lots of YouTube videos to show how, the one I used is

HERE, it creates a wonderful sturdy finished 5" x 5" box frame, from a single sheet of 12" x 12" paper.

Using a brick stencil, I used Tim Holtz Distress Texture Paste on the left hand side and Grit Paste on the right side hand and left these to dry.

Both pieces were spritzed with Tim Holtz Distress Spray Stain in a combination of Fired Brick and Rusty Hinge. The Texture Paste (left) soaks up the colour beautifully and the two colour tones showed up clearly. The Grit Paste did not soak up the colour of the stain as easily and took quite some time to dry. I repeated the step but the colour remained pale.

To give some light and shade to both sets of the bricks I painted some of bricks with various Distress Paints, watered down a little. I think the bricks look a little more realistic now and the Grit Paste takes the colour of the paint much easier than the stain.

I applied the Grit Paste bricks to the inside of my frame and added the Texture Paste bricks to the front of my frame.

Finally, I coloured one of the dogs from Tim's Crazy Dog set of stamps, with Distress Markers, cut him out and mounted him with some foam pads to give him some dimension. The words are from Tim's Idea-ology Label Letters, mounted onto some white card.

I hope you will join in with our Create a Frame Challenge over at A Vintage Journey. There is always a wonderful prize on offer from DecoArt. If you have time, do please go over and see what my talented teamies have made for your inspiration too!
As always, thanks so much for your visit!