Steam Punk Collage

I was delighted to receive the new Eco Green Paris Trunk Ink Pads and Eco Green Steam Punk Accessories stamp set for my Altered Element DT pack this month. These new ink pads have very soft colours and are easy to blend. They are not as wet as Distress Inks but that seems to make them stamp quite crisply so I was very impressed with them. I was delighted with the stamps as they combine very well with the Vintage Aviation set I already had, and the Playful Gents Artchix images I had left over from a previous month's pack. I found the Eco Green stamps very good quality and I liked the fact that they are already mounted and trimmed.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you may possibly recognize the tray. Do you remember the marzipan and dried fruits in the New Year? Well, I had to eat my way through them all to empty this out. I could be very cool and trendy and say it is a printer's tray, but no, it was from a French supermarket!

First of all I cut pieces of mountboard to fit the sections and inked them up over Tim Holtz Cog and Compass masks, using the two Paris Trunk inks and a DI Dried Marigold, then did some water flicking. I stamped a selection of the images from both stamp sets, and popped the Playful Gents behind some microscope glass and added memory foil tape. I cut some Tim Holtz Alterations Cogs in both black shrink plastic and mountboard, and gold embossed the mountboard ones.

I had problems with painting the tray itself. I have been looking for a while for something akin to Tim Holtz Crackle Paint but I think I will just stick to the real thing. I bought this two stage crackle in France and the whole process took ages. The idea was to start with a pale colour, in this case white, then mix the coral acrylic paint with Step 1, then when it was dry, paint on Step 2, and wait for that to dry. The whole process took an age and all I was left with were some very, very subtle white cracks, which looked nice close up but weren't really that exciting. I went over it with sepia ink on a sponge partly because I wanted to soften the colour, but partly to emphasize the cracks, as you would with the Tim product. Unfortunately as you probably guessed, all that did was camouflage the white cracks completely so now it looks very bland.

I hope you like it. Overall I am ok with it, just disappointed with my crackles! Definitely love those stamps, though!