Pixels & Paper ~ January 2016 Challenge

LUV these girls!

Happy New Year!!!
WOW, can anyone believe it's already 2016?  Just where did 2015 go, that's what I'd like to know!!!  Anyway, the start of a new month, being January 2016 (!!) also means it's the start of a new challenge over at Pixels & Paper!  This month we have an awesome, colourful image to get your creative juices flowing...

Your criteria is to use paint in your piece, and of course, explain what inspiration you took from this fabulous photo!

For my own piece, I was taken with the idea of facepaint, and I knew I had a gorgeous photo of my daughter and her friend with facepainting on, from about 5 years ago.  That formed the basis of my layout for this month:

On a piece of heavy-weight white cardstock, I firstly applied a coat of gesso to prime the cardstock, and also to give it a bit of extra weight so it could handle a watercolouring technique.  Next I stencilled the Wendy Vecchi Studio 490 'Sunburst' using DecoArt Crackle Medium ~ two complete sunbursts, and one partial sunburst off the bottom edge of the page.

Once the Crackle Medium was dry , I then used my Koh-i-Nooh watercolour paints in pink and purple, brushes and water misting bottle to create the random splashes and runs of colour on the background, making sure the watercolour was able to run through the cracks of the Crackle Medium.

I stamped some IndigoBlu stitches onto white tissue paper with StazOn ink.  I also stamped some flowers from Stampin' Up! 'Bloom with Hope' set onto white tissue paper with StazOn ink.  I cut out these shapes roughly from the tissue paper.  With the flowers, I coloured in the middle of the flowers on the reverse side of the tissue paper using 'Calypso Coral' Stampin' Write Marker.  I then mod-podged these stamped pieces of tissue paper onto my background.

To add a little bit of sparkle to the layout, I went back with a Twinkling H2O in 'Coral Berry' and added some splatters and runs of colour randomly on the page.  I also used the Coral Berry to colour up some Kaisercraft White Paper Flowers.

I grabbed some chippie letters spelling out "LUV", sanded them off and re-coloured them using Liquitex Acrylic Ink, and used the leftover ink to colour up a piece of gauze.  I stuck the chippie letters down with Scrapdots and hand-wrote "these girls!" in black Liquitex Acrylic Ink and my nib pen.  I included some additional doodling around the title with different nibs and the black ink.

Finally I matted my colour photo on white cardstock, and my black and white photo on patterned purple paper to give each some distinction from the busyness of the background.  I used the piece of coloured gauze and the flowers to add a bit of dimension to the page between the photos.

Thanks for visiting this month - good luck to everyone who enters the challenge!

Cheers!
Deb.xx