Dragonfly Mixed Media Class

1. Dragonfly Mixed Media Class: Hi, I'm Cheryl. Welcome to the dragonfly mixed media class. Mixed media is just mixing up different medias, mediums, paste that sort of thing, and creating a project with it. Let's go take a look at what we're going to create in this class. In this class we're gonna be starting from a plain wood panel. And I'll guide you through step-by-step on how to create this piece here. So we're gonna be using some gestures, some collaged medium, different dicots to enhance your project. Different texture pastes in stencils as well as some stamps and leafing wax. All the supplies that are used to create this piece are on the supply list that is included with this class. And those supplies are also linked to where you can purchase them if you choose, but you certainly don't have to. This class centers around these dragonflies. You could also swap them out for different dicots if you choose, or different colors, the sky is the limit. Now let's go make some mixed media. 2. Adding Gesso & Collage Paper to our Art Panel: All right, so the very first step for our project is we need to seal our wood panel and we're gonna do that wisdom and Jess, so that's going to give the texture, paste the sprays and everything a good surface to adhere to. Just do the sides first. I typically only do one coat because I find that that covers it enough for my liking. But you can certainly do more than one code if you feel that you need it. Because there's so much going on over top. It doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. It just needs to be sealed encoded. Because we are gonna be using sprays. We're gonna be using collage paper. We're gonna be using texture paste and all that stuff. So most of your Jesu is not really going to be seen, which is typically how you want it. You don't necessarily want your JSR to be super visible because it's just a base coat. I'm applying a decent amount. I'm not I'm making sure that it's not super thin because I do want to have it sealed and I don't want to see the wood green through it. Just typically hold it in one area so that my panels that moving around my surface here. I'm just doing this on a glass map because it's very easy to clean up once I'm done. You could also do it on like a silicone matter, whatever that would be easy to clean up as well. Alright, so now that that is completely covered, I'm going to leave it to dry completely before we move on to the next step is completely dried. So now we're gonna add some collage papers. So this is some Tim Holtz collage paper. It just goes along with the theme of the piece that we're creating. You could also create your own by using some permanent ink and stamping onto tissue paper that would work as well. So I want to put it in the top-left corner, in the bottom right corner. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to rip it kind of in a diagonal. If you want to have control over your line, you can put just a thin line of water with a paintbrush. And then you can control exactly where it's going to rip. For this, I don't mind it being a little bit more organic. I'm going to leave it over the edge a little bit because I want to put it down the sides of the piece. I've got a Collage brush here with some collage glue. And I'm going to put it underneath where that piece is going to go. Doesn't need to be a thick coat. A thin coat is just fine. Then lay your piece down. Make sure there's no bubbles in it or wrinkles. Then use the collage glue to seal it in. 3. Adding texture with Stencils & Paste: Alright, so the first paste texture pace that we're going to add is some translucent grit paste. So this is gonna be a little bit gritty, but it's going to be also a little bit translucent. And we're going to do this flower stencil and it's gonna be behind where the dragon fly. Is going to sit on the canvas around the art panel. I'm paying attention to where the flowers are and trying to only put paste where I want it to go. I don't really want to have like a half a flower somewhere. We're going to use three different pace in this project. We're going to use this translucent grit paste. We're also going to use some crackled paste and then just some regular opaque texture paste. Because they all have different looks to them and they're gonna react a little bit differently with the sprays that we're gonna be using. So when you're putting this paste on, you want to make sure that you're not putting on a layer that's to fix. So I'm doing it basically even with the top of the stencil. I'm using the side of my ninth year to do it, to scrape it clean and then putting the access back in the container. Now, you could let this completely dry before moving on to the next section. But because I'm gonna put the dragon fly in the center, I'm not really too worried about this getting messed up. So I'm going to put my sensible back down again. Do you putting it the same way? You don't want to flip it over because you've got stencil paste on the front of this stencil. And if you flipped it over, you would be transferring that to the background of your piece and that is going to affect it. So I'm gonna do the same thing as before on this, I'm paying attention to where the flowers are, where the leaves are, and only putting the paste through the areas that I want to see. If you're more comfortable, you could take some painters tape or whatever and tape off any sections you don't want to accidentally get paste in. But I'm not too worried about it. If there's an area that gets paste in it that I don't really want. Usually there's ways to cover it up. You're probably won't necessarily see it. And typically, what we think, our mistakes or things that other people don't even see. I'm going to close my paste up, lift up my stencil. This needs to dry completely before we move on to the next step. There's any stuff on this either you want to scrape it off while it is wet. So this needs to be cleaned off while this is drying. And I'll see you back and we'll do the next next texture pane. Alright, the next type of paste we're going to use for this project is some crackle case. This is the type of paste. It looks regular when you use it, it's quite creamy. But as it dries, it's going to have a crackle effect to it, which is going to add more texture to our project without anymore effort. I'm putting the paste a few different areas where I want to see a bit of a different texture. Now I typically, when I'm doing things on a project or mixed media or wherever I typically go by the rule of odd numbers. So I'll put it in odd number places so far I've got three places. I'm going to do tiny little bit up here and I'm trying to make sure not to put it in the areas or put my stencil down where I've got some wet paste because once again, I don't want to mess that up. Then I'm going to put a little bit in this corner here. Then once again, I need to let it completely dry before moving on to the next step. The other thing that I'm trying to pay attention to as well as I don't have any straight lines. So all of the places that I've put paste it's in kind of random shapes so that I don't have straight lines. Personal preference. But something that I like to do, once again, that needs to completely dry before the next step, and this needs to be cleaned off as soon as possible. You don't want your paint to dry on your stencil or on your palette knife. I'll see you in a moment. All right, we're ready for our last type of texture paste. So this is just regular, plain, old opaque white texture pace. So I'm not actually going to use a stencil with this. I'm just going to put it around some of the edges in random shapes. I don't want to have necessarily a full smear. It's just adding another little bit of a different texture in is, if you want, you can do your texture patient over the side as well. I tend not to other than cleaning it up off the side. But you certainly could if that is something that you would like to do. Little tiny bit right in here. Alright, so our texture paste is done once again, we need to wait for that to completely dry. Make sure you clean off your palette knife so that it doesn't dry on there. And then once this is completely dry, we are starting to be we will be ready to start spraying it with our color sprays. 4. Adding Colour to our Piece: All right, Now our texture paste has completely dried and we're ready to add some color and we're gonna do the color for this piece with some spray stains. They're just colored sprays. And being in a spray form makes it very easy to apply the color. Now, I have this collage paper here, and when I created a project similar to this, I completely covered the collage papers. So by the end you couldn't see it. So just be aware that if you want to be able to see this with your final project control you're spraying. I want to concentrate my darker colors in the center. And then I want a tiny bit on the outside, but I still want to leave a little bit of whitespace. So I'm going to start with my light colors. Two of these here are distress spray states, so they are just die based, so they're a little bit more transparent. The one is an oxide spray that is a dye pigment blend. So that is going to be more opaque. You can see the sprays kind of stay where I put them. When I want to move them around, I just use a sprayer, some spray and they're going to start flowing around a little bit. Then you can tilt your project. If you want them to flow into different areas. If like for instance, say I wanted that to be a little bit wider. Again, I didn't want the over spray. I can just take a paper towel and dab some of that up. The gesso is going to stain a little bit from the spray, but I can't control a little bit and take some of it up. If I want to have a little bit more control while moving my sprays around, I can use a brush like this. There's just a watercolor brush. And because these sprays or just a diabetes to ink, they will not ruin a watercolor brush. I want a little bit more in this corner here. This one here. But again, I'm making sure not to completely cover my collage paper. I'm going to add a little bit of the oxide spray in the center. Now because this is a dye pigment blend, that pigment tends to settle on the bottom. You want to make sure to shake it ahead of time and best to shake it with the lid on so that you don't accidently gets spray all over? Well, that was a lot lot more opaque than I anticipated. So if you put some spray and you want less, just dab it up a little bit. This is definitely not neat and tidy project. This is definitely project where you're going to get a little bit messy. Personally, it's something that I don't mind. But if you were worried about standing your hands or whatever, you could absolutely. Where some gloves, like I said, this is a dye spray so it will stay in your hands is only going to be temporary. I happen to have happen to not have a dishwasher, so I'm constantly washing dishes. So I have my hands in a sink of water so often that even if I stay in my hands, it's never very long. I know it does bother some people. I'm trying to get a little bit of that gray color around the edges as well, but I don't want it to be super opaque and I want to have a little bit of control where it goes. So I'm using my brush to do that. Then keep in mind, our image is going to be in the center here. So a lot of this here, you're not really going to see a lot of detail on. I've got a thing of water here. If you want to clear your brush, that is a good thing to have around. These will generally not move a whole lot when they're drying. They may spread like a tiny little bit, but it's not gonna be very much. So they'll pretty much stay where you have them. Especially if you're on a level surface, if you're on a slanted surface, they will. Gravity does its thing. I'm just picking up some of the color just because I want to make sure that I leave some whitespace. I don't want it completely covered. That's where some water and then paper towel comes in handy. You can add a little bit of the darker blue. Really, we're just playing with this until we have exactly what we're wanting. And obviously this is not something that's a precise, pristine look, mixed media kind of looks a little bit all over the place. I think I'm going to leave it like that. I'm happy with how things are. Now. If after it's dried, you decide that it's not dark enough or you want something else, you can absolutely add more sprays. But keep in mind these are diabase, raise their water, reactive, water-soluble. So as soon as you start praying, spraying, you're going to be rehydrating those inks so they will start to move again. So they are not permanent inks. If you're wanting something or if you're wanting it to be permanent and not move once they are sprayed or was there dried? You can use like an acrylic spray to seal it, but they are definitely going to be rehydrated as it is if you don't spray it to protect it. All right. I like that. I'm going to leave it as is and let it dry. Now, you'll see that I have my I'm Matt here underneath it. That's just kind of make it easier to clean up. I could clean up off my glass Matt easily enough as well. But sometimes those sprays have a little bit of a mind of their own and sometimes they spray off to the side or whatever. So just keep that in mind. Some people like to spray within a box to keep it a little bit contained and that's an option as well. There you go. I'll see you in the next video and we'll start to create our dragonfly. 5. Creating the Small Dragonflies: All right, so the first dragonfly that we're going to create for our piece is this little tiny one here. So I'll show you how to make one and then you can make as many as you would like for your piece. So I've got my dragonfly die here is from this set here, we're just making just the dragonfly. I'm going to cut it out of black card stock. And then I've got some teal metallic card stock that we're going to cut it out. Then I've got some iridescent gift wrap, um, or like cellophane that we are going to use as well. For the black one, I've got all of the pieces cut, but I'm only going to use this one here for the project is going to be the base of the dragon fly. So the other two pieces can be put aside. This is the metallic card stock that I have. You can use whatever color you want. If you can't find it in colors, you could just do say a silver metallic and use it or uses silver and then color it with alcohol ink to whatever color you choose. The different colors of metallic guard soccer. A little bit more readily available. Now, I'm cutting all three of the pieces because they all come on. One die is much easier to cut all of them at once. And then you can just pick and choose which piece you're going to use. So from this color, this is the piece that we're gonna use. I'm gonna set that aside and we'll put it all together in a moment. M2, the bits out of the die, if there's anything that sticks in your diet between pieces, you want to definitely poke them out because it can affect the cutting. Make sure that it's clean. This piece here is some of the cellophane, iridescent cellophane. I've taken some double-sided tape and put it on vellum just to make it easier to die cut, as well as the fact that when I tried dye cutting the cellophane just by itself, it did die cut. But it was really, really flimsy. It didn't sit right on the dragon fly when I tested it out. So this velum is just going to give it a little bit more stability. Just going to work better for what we're doing here. All right, I'm going to move the machine a moment. For this one here. The piece that I'm using is the wings. I'm going to poke that out. This piece here has a few little bits that are inside the wings that can also get poked out. One doesn't want to. When I put pieces out, I typically push them in with my Deepak and then I pull them from the back. The odd time if they're not completely cut through and it rips a little bit. If it's from the back, you don't necessarily notice it as much. I think it's in the center. It's not completely dicot through. But we're gonna put the the dragon fly together anyways, I'm just going to use my scissors and cut it through. You could also just put it back into the die, are wearing it and put it through again. But because that was a straight line, it's easy enough to do it through the scissors. All right, I'm taking my distress collage medium, so if any glue happens to show through, it's going to be completely clear. Putting the TOO metallic one over top of the black. A couple of those wings match the base. I hold it in place for a couple of seconds just to make sure that it is secure. Then I'm going to put this one on here. Once again, this one will need to be held in place just a few more seconds because it's going against the metallic card stock. And because that's non porous, it takes a few minutes for the glue to actually hold. But there we go. There's one of our dragonflies and you want to make as many as you want on your piece. 6. Creating the Large Dragonfly: The next dragonfly we're gonna do is this one here is actually a dye called Perspective moth. But ever since it came out to me, those wings especially make it look like a dragon fly. I know the body is a little bit too wide for a dragonfly, but I think it's gonna work anyways for what we're doing. The card stock I'm using here is watercolor paper. The reason I'm using watercolor papers once we've got it die cut and we've manipulated it and put it together. I'm going to use those sprays to color it. Watercolor paper. It's not going to warp. Be. It's going to take those dies very well and that's going to help them blend on the paper. There's a lot of detail in those wings, so I typically run it through both ways. Now before I take it out of the die, I take my tool and one and I go like this and it helps to poke any loose pieces out. It's just easier to do it then after it's come out of the die. And then you can also do it in the body as well. We can take that piece out. Any of those bits and pieces that are stuck in there will need to be removed. Nothing left in that die, but I want to cut that body one more time. I'm just cutting a little chunk off of that scrap. The part of the body I'm actually wanting is this lower part here. I don't I'm not worried about the top there because it's gonna be cut off anyways. There we go. Let's get the machine out of the way. Then once again, take this out of the dye, try to poke all those pieces out first. You might need to depict to help pick it out. For the body. I'm going to take some scissors and I'm just going to cut those wing pieces off. Then I'm going to turn the camera off to take a moment and I'm just going to pop all these pieces out. They should just pop right out, but I just don't want to waste your time watching me do that. So I'll be back in a moment, right? We've got all our pieces taken out. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to extend the tail of this moth to create a dragonfly. I'm going to cut this top one, kind of round around the body. Just so it looks kind of like a little bit of a natural segment. Decide where I want to place it. Going to place it right up there. So I want to cut this part here. I don't want to see any of these bits behind. I'm going to take my distress collage medium. I'm going to glue the two of them together there. Now I have a little jug, jug here in a jog there. Once the glue is completely dry, I'm going to trim that so it looks a little bit more even and natural. And frankly, with mixed media, there's so much going on in pieces anyways that I don't think you're going to necessarily be focused on. That is two different dicot pieces joined together. So our dragonfly there has done. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my sprays and I'm going to color it. Now. I'm going to use the two blues from the background, but I'm not going to use the oxide spray because it's got a bit of a chalky look to it. For that part. I'm going to use some distress ink refill. I have some in my palette here. If I need some more, I've got my jar here. What I'm going to do first, I'm just going to spray it right onto the watercolor paper. Lighter color in the center of the body. Door for color towards the outside. I'm doing it fairly close to the butterfly so that I don't have a lot of over spray and that the sprays from here are quite targeted so that I have a darker color here. Going to lightly wet my brush here. 1 second. Before that, I want to put some blue down the center of my butterfly there because I want to get a little bit. Of blue in the body. I'm going to use my brush here and I'm just going to put this black around the outside edges. The body. Now I'm going to need some more from my bottle here. Typically I don't put quite that much paint on my palette, but that's okay. It never dries out and it doesn't go to waste. So you can choose how much or how little of that blue you see in the center. I want to have just a little bit of a bit of a stripe. I just want to touch it there to incorporate it into the body. There we go. All right, this needs to dry it 100% completely. Once it is dry, we're going to glue some of that cellophane behind the wings so that we get a little bit of an iridescent wings like dragonflies have. So I'll see you in a moment for you when this is completely dry and we will do that. Alright, so now my dragonfly is completely dry, so I'm going to glue it onto this film here that should fit just alright, so I'm going to use my distress collage medium. I'm just going around the edges. I don't need to glue all the little veins in the wings just around the edges. I am going to glue it onto the body as well. I want to see a little bit of that iridescence in there. All right, then I'm going to lay it on here and let it dry completely. And then once it totally dry, we're gonna cut it all out. The glue is completely dry from the dragon fly, so we just need to cut it out. We are dragonfly is done with a pretty iridescent wings. 7. Adding Stamping & Leafing Texture: Alright, so our drag dragonflies are assembled. I also die cut some vellum and some card stock leaves for the dragonflies to sit on in our piece. And I was playing around with assembly or with layout it. But before we actually glue anything down, I want to add a little bit of stamp texture to the back and I'm going to use peacock feathers. It's the same color as the spray, but this isn't the ink pad form. You could do black as well, but because you can still see some of the stuff from the collage paper, I didn't think we really needed any texture in the black, but it's absolutely an option. This is gonna be subtle, it's not gonna be very prominent, is just to add just a touch of, just a touch of touch texture. Some of it you may not see anymore once the layout is done because the leaves might be in the way, but I'm just going to put them in any of the places that I think are open spaces that could use a little bit of texture. And I think I'm gonna leave it. Do one more there. There we go. Just a touch. Now the other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to add some foundry wax. I've got some Sterling foundry wax which will go with the grays blacks, silver is in the piece and I'm going to put it around the edges. I'm also going to put just a little bit on the texture pace. This is a leafing wax that you need to use a heat gun for the leafing to come to the surface. I could use a brush to put this on, but my favorite tool is actually my finger. I'm doing it for sure around all of the corners because I want it to kind of frame the piece. Then like I said, a little bit on some of the texture paste. Just to highlight that a little bit. Now, like I said, it takes a heat gun to, for the texture to come to the surface. You want to be careful with your heat gun that it's, you never aim it at your bottle because it will harden rate in your bottle. You want to be careful where your bottle with Foundry wax is while you're using your heat gun. You can see it's going to paste quite quickly on my table. It dries really quickly. So you do need to work fairly fast with it. If you want to make dots with it. Splatters, sorry, you can use a bottle. You can use some isopropyl alcohol and I'm going to take a brush just to thin it out. Then I like to most smack it against a brush. I found doing it with my finger wasn't quite enough. And it's going to make very subtle splatter. So we're not getting in your face. Large splatters, It's just very tiny, subtle ones. I'm trying to make sure that they are in areas that I don't I'm not gonna put my leaves and my dragonflies, so I want to make them a little bit more visible. I think that's enough. This will actually just dry rate on my brush. And once it's dry, I can just click it into a garbage can. It will be like dust. This because I've already got some isopropyl alcohol down in order to clean it. Just wipe it right up. So super easy cleanup. Now I'm gonna get my heat gun and I'm going to try to make that leafing come to the surface. Hopefully you can see it on camera. Here we go. I'm not sure if he could see the reaction. It goes from adult silver to a shiny silver and it does it right before your eyes. Much like that. Much like the reaction that happens with embossing when you're stamping and embossing. Now, you could highlight some of your dicot pieces, but if you wanted to do that, you need to do that ahead of time before we put this elephant on it, the cellophane won't take kindly to a heat gun, it'll start melting and traveling. Just be aware that if you wanted to put this on any parts of your dicots, it needs to be done before we add the cellophane to it. There we go. In our next video, we're gonna start assembling the dragonfly and the leaves in the center. We'll see you there. 8. Adhering our Die Cut Embellishments: Alright, so in this video we're going to do our assembly. So the first thing to glue down is some of those leaves, and I'm only putting them on the base of the leaf. I'm not too worried about the tops or the outer edges being glued down. Because frankly, I like when they it lifts off a little bit, I'm using my same distress collage meeting that I've been using throughout the class. Now. I'm not holding it down for the glue to dry. So as I'm moving stuff and putting things around, they are going to move. What I'm trying to ensure is that I don't see any leaf ends poking out. I'm trying to put it all towards the center. I'm trying to have them hidden by my dicots. And I'm also trying to remember how I hadn't laid out before. The other thing that I'm trying to ensure is that I don't have the exact same dicots over top of each other. So this dice that has five different leaves, and I cut out those leaves in both the silver card stock as well as the velum. I'm trying to make sure that I have different leaves over top of each other. So that like I said, I don't have the exact same leaf on top of the exact same leaf. One of those things, it's just a personal preference of mine. I want to put another one right in there. When I was laying things out before I had the leaf die cuts, I just found that it needed something to lift it up from the background. And that's what these leaves are doing. It just gives us surface for those dragonflies to rest on. There we go. So you can see that they are, leaf ends are lifting up. The vellum especially does not like adhesive. That is going to happen. But once I have all of this stuff glued down, I'm going to put something to weight it down and let it completely dry before we do our last few steps. The other thing I'm doing, so now I'm pulling my small dragonflies down and I want to make sure that they're not facing the same ways. Again, that's a personal preference thing of mine. I don't like having everything facing the same way, so I try to move that around. Alright, I'm gonna leave that to dry. Like I said, I'm gonna put something heavy on top of it to weigh it down. These ones don't need something super heavy, but that will do. I'll see you in the next video when this is completely dried and we'll continue. 9. Finishing our piece with Gloss Spray Splatters: All right, so the very last thing that I want to add is some splatters with some gloss sprays. Now these are basically acrylic paint that has a glossy finish, but it comes in a spray bottle. You want to make sure that you shake it really, really well. Then all I'm doing for the splatters, It's just tapping the plastic. So just be careful that you don't spill the juror while you've got the lid off. You can see that we get some random splatter sizes. I'm going to let that completely dry. Then once that is completely dry, we will add the next color. So I've got three different colors that all coordinate, letting them dry in between just because if I splattered some of this while this is still wet, they're gonna start to mix and I want them to be their own thing and just dry in-between. I'll see you in a minute, right? So our first layer is pretty much dry. This one here, this larger splat is not dry, but I'm just going to do the next one anyways. It's only been a few minutes, so they do dry fairly quickly. I'm gonna do the same procedure with this one. Do as much or as little as you like. I'm good with that. So now I'm going to let that dry and I'll see you in a moment and we'll do the third color. Now we are ready for our third color. 1 second, let's shake it up first. Make sure everything's mixed up really, really well. Then exactly the same procedure as before. On as much or as little as you would like. If you don't like this butters, you can absolutely leave them off. I just love the texture that it adds. By using the different colors. I find it just ties the whole thing together. I used to blues and a white. You could change that dark blue for a black because we have black or even silver. But we already did this silver with the leafing. I liked the blue with it. Now obviously that white is still wet, but just take, take a look at, just add some interesting texture to it. And that is our completed piece. 10. Dragonfly Mixed Media Class Thank You: Thank you so much for joining me for the dragonfly mixed media class. I hope you enjoyed the process. Learning how to collage, how to add texture pace, how to use dicots in your mixed media projects and enhance them, as well as different ways to finish your products with stamps and gloss phrase. I hope to see you soon in another class.