April Tag Friday for AVJ (Bumblebees and Butterflies)

Well it's taken me a week since I have been back from holiday to get my head back into crafting and this is my offering for our Tag Friday post at A Vintage Journey.

I began by choosing the largest tag size I have which is a giant #12 knowing that I wanted to use a layered butterfly that was coloured up when teaching my reverse canvas (Here if you missed it). First I scraped over white gesso and heat dried it and then scraped over white crackle paint and left it to dry naturally.

Whikst the crackles were beginning to appear I started to gather all the elements together that I thought I would use for the focal point and collaged background. The butterfly was embossed with distress embossing powders and had paints dripped into the recesses before being sealed with Americana gloss varnish spray.

The wooden boards were left over from experiments or demos with my wooden board technique. A tutorial can be found on AVJ here.

I decided to give this mini tag the same treatment as the giant one with the gesso and crackle paint then blended it with peacock feathers and broken china distress inks, distressed and inked the edges with ground espresso and finally dipped and dried using evergreen bough, stormy sky and broken china DIs.

When the giant one was dry I dipped it in cadmium red, hansa yellow and titanium white media acrlic paints spritzed with water and spritzed them on the tag too to create this mottled effect.

Using Tim Holtz dies I cut various flowers and the words from mop up and discarded painty papers, added some remnant rubs .....

... and you can also see how the crackle came out with the blended and dipped paints over the top.

I also used the tiny tattered florals to add more dimension .....

... alongside the butterfly.

This really is a huge tag measuring 10 1/2 inches tall.

Thanks to everyone who visited and left comments whilst I was away, I now need to get back into a routine of keeping in touch with you all so I will be visiting asap.

Please pop over to AVJ to see all the other amazing tags from the team.

Have a great weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx

All products are available at Country View Crafts