Creating the look of rust

Ordinary cardboard with the top layer of paper peeled

The start of the layout

Background board and die cuts

Major, major OOPS

If you are on Pinterest or follow any blogs that feature Tim Holtz and/or Seth Apter type of work, you know that "rust" is in. Grunge is back, probably because it has never really left the artist palette. There are a few lines of paint on the market that will give paper, wood, metal, whatever the look of rust. I have yet to buy them. Give me time.

Over the weekend, I found a new blog to follow, and it's on the sidebar: bubblebeesandbutterflies. She does some amazing work with nothing more than imagination and acrylic paint. One of her many blog posts she demoed how to create the look of rust using orange, brown, and black paints. Yesterday I pulled out the following in Golden Fluid Acrylics: Red Oxide, Burnt Sienna, and Quinacridone/Nickel Azo Gold. I also used Americana Terra Cotta, a craft paint but I didn't have a color close to this in the Golden paints. I did one light coat of Red Oxide over the die cut pieces, let it dry, then started to pick up the other 3 colors at random, dabbing them on. Here are the results:

They are a little red, so I may add some orange or yellow, or even a little light green to the mix, then splatter with black. By the way, I have followed Seth Apter's example in die cutting multiple pieces of card stock, then stacking them and using a UHU glue stick to adhere the layers together. The idea is to create texture and depth in the finished project. No idea what that is going to be. Stay tuned.

The Stars. Yeah, boy. Let's talk about how sensitive the scanner is on the Brother's Scan N Cut. I drew the star on printer paper, then used a No. 2 pencil to fill in the star. Thought I had done a good job, cleaned up the edges with an eraser. Scanned it into the machine, saved it, and then did one test print. The scanner had picked up on my individual pencil marks, making many, many minute scratch type cuts in the card stock. Took forever. Lesson learned. Use a Sharpie or paint to fill in areas.

Have a good one.
Linda