Art In Bloom: Altered Beer Mats By Carol Fox

I was lucky enough to attend the Paperartsy retailer training day recently and even luckier to leave with this set of stamps by Jo Firth Young. Some of you may remember the bunting I did in the magazine a few months ago with a circus theme. I thought I would do a similer project here, but show how it can look completely different by simply using a different colour scheme and a softer style stamp.

What I did

• I created a crackle base on my beer mats using Fresco Finish paints and the crackle medium between the two layers of colour.
• I stamped my images directly onto the mats using black Archival Ink and dried this to heat set it.
• I used the Fresco paints again to colour my images, to do this I put a small spot of colour onto my craft mat, added a small spritz of water to dilute it, and then applied it to the painted image with a fine paint brush.
• I could see once my images were painted that the background was still too stark, so I dry brushed using the same pink shade I had painted the images with, brushing inwards from the edge so the colour was deeper at the edge and faded as it got towards the middle. I sealed it all with a coat of multi medium.
• I stamped my words directly onto the mats and coated them with Glossy Accents to make them "pop" a little bit.
• My smaller mat hanging from the centre is just a larger mat cut in half and coloured, stamped and painted in exactly the same way.
• I punched holes and added eyelets to each mat as shown. I used jump rings join the mats together, adding a length of chain to each end so it could be hung up.
• To finish I added a short length of beaded ribbon trim to each of the outer mats using a strong glue.

I used...

4 beer mats or hand cut your own from cardboard packaging

Paperartsy Rubber Stamps: JOFY10, ELB01

Paperartsy Fresco Paints: Mermaid, Nougat, Sherbet, Pansy, London Bus, Pumpkin Soup, Toad Hall

Multi Medium

Glossy Accents

Jump rings and chain

Beaded ribbon trim

If you have any questions at all please feel free to contace me via my personal blog where I will do my best to answer. Carol x