De-stressing with Distress Art!

Welcome to the Stampendous Design Team's Week of Distress!  No, not the bad kind of distress, we're playing with products from Stampendous and Andy Skinner to create some fun Distress Art. There's nothing like playing with art supplies to help me relax. I just love the distressed look on projects, and I love that there are no mistakes in distress projects, you just make it work by adding more layers!  If you really need precision in your creations, this style may not be for you, but you should try it just for the fun of it, you may be pleasantly surprised!

Here my "de-stressing" project for today:

The Stampendous Creative Palette is the perfect way to start a distress project. I used acrylic paints to create various fall backgrounds. I keep a stash of these for when needed, so today I went to my stash and found a piece I could use to stamp and die cut my three oak leaves, CRS5052 Jumbo Leaves and DCS5068 Leaf Die Cut Set.

The background is a piece of green mat board left over from a framing project, distressed with a little red and brown inks, and stamped multiple times with the peeled paint background stamp from Andy Skinner's Industrial set, ASCRS03 in Memento Tuxedo Black.  The final touch was some Spoonful of Rust from Stampendous sprinkled in two corners and heated from below. This takes a little more time because you are heating through mat board.

The middle layer is a piece of Mixed Media White Paper from Stampendous, rouged with various colors of Brilliance and Memento inks (Rust, Rocket Red, Sunflower Yellow, Olive, Ivy, Rich Cocoa and Tuxedo Black). Heat set the inks and sprinkle with the Spoonful of Rust and heat set from below.

The molten looking element under the Autumn layer is from a "mistake" I made when pasting the word Autumn the first time, sprinkling it with aged wine embossing enamel and heating it. The paste had bled under the stencil a little (ok, a lot), but I thought the powder would hide it, it didn't so I scraped it off, but I loved how it looked, so it became an embellishment! Here's a close up:

Paste emboss the Dreamweaver Autumn stencil with Matte Black Embossing Paste on a scrap piece of left over paper from the leaves, let dry or use a heat tool, but be careful or it will bubble.

Layer it all up using glue to hold everything in place, and put it in a pretty frame. I had a lot of fun making this piece, and love that everything can be fixed when you're distressing it anyway!

Today's "distressed" designers are:

Stampendous Blog

Pam Hornschu

Kristine Reynolds

Louise Healy

Happy Creating,
Louise