Flourishing Birdsong by Alison

Hello everyone, Alison here with you from Words and Pictures, and I've got a rusty panel to share with you today.  It actually started out as a simple tag and then grew!

Sometimes the Calico Craft Parts take centre stage on a piece, sometimes they provide a fantastic base or substrate, and sometimes they provide a fabulous background flourish... and that's what they're doing for me today.

There are so many fantastic swirls and flourishes and decorative corners amongst the Craft Parts - ideal for scrapbooking layouts or to add brilliant swirling movement to a journalling spread (as I did with my recent pages for Wanderlust, which you can see below - using Fancy Flower Flourish Style 3 and Curled Vine Fancy Flourish Style 4).

I don't scrapbook (not really being a photo-taker), but the flourishes can also take their place in mixed media work - canvases, altered frames or, as here, a layered papercraft panel.

As I say, it started out with a simple tag.  I'd wiped some leftover gesso onto it, and then stamped some of my favourite wild grasses.

I started to add inky colour, and when you spritz and flick you get really white spots because of the gesso underneath.  I also added some flecks of inky colour.

In the long run, I had to add quite a bit more stamping so that the grasses would show behind the bird, and the white spots were a bit too much, so I inked over them (I'll be working with the look another time, though).

I knew I wanted to use the bird, but he looked a bit too much for the tag, so I decided I needed some background layers to create a larger piece...

... so it was out with the corrugated cardboard and some paper scraps, and that of course is when the flourishes became inevitable!  All the layers are glued down with corrugated cardboard in between so that you get lots of dimension, but also lots of room to slide the ends of the flourishes between layers too.

The flourishes have been altered quite simply and yet the effect, I think, is pretty dramatic.  All the pieces used are from the Fancy Flower Flourish Style 2.

I just applied some DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylic in Quinacridone Gold with my fingers (which takes longer to type than to do!) - a pretty rough coat - and then some sweeps of gilding wax over the top and around the edges in places.

I really like the warm glow - especially when the sun hits it.

Some stickers add the equally important (to me) word element.

And some extra little ends of flourish take their place with some of the words.  There's no denying these flourishes are delicate - they have such intricate cutting - but if you do lose a curlicue you can either simply glue it back in to position, or with a project like this you can tuck it around another corner!

The corrugated cardboard has had some Quin Gold too, and various other paints and embossing powders, to create a rusty look.  And some real rusty wire means you can hang the whole panel up somewhere to wait for spring.

I hope you like it.  It does change look quite considerably according to the light on it.  It's one thing when it's in the shade...

... but it almost seems to have an inner fire when the sun hits it full on!

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  As always, you can click on the links to go shopping at Calico Craft Parts, and I hope you have a wonderful week.

Alison x
Words and Pictures