Hello! It’s Rae, sharing some tips to create a Bad Ass Vibe to your projects! So this December kit was bursting with bold colors, and mixed in with some black and white, which was excellent for balancing all of the colors. I love the look of dark backgrounds with patterns, but sometimes it’s nice to smooth it out, and whitewashing your papers is a great technique for doing that.
My reason for whitewashing this particular layout is that I wanted to use this photo of my kids- it’s a rare occasion when I can get all three of them looking cute and attentive in one shot, and the paper in the kit that had the quote reminded me of this picture I took in 2016- “The little things are the big things.” Such a true, true statement!” However, when I pulled out the picture, I couldn’t see it working with what I had left of the kit, so took a different approach and made the papers work for me.
This technique is so simple: it requires gesso, a small bowl or container, water, and a paint brush.
I stared with creating the first part of my design- layers under the photo. I whatewashed these three pieces first- I diluted some gesso with water in a container, and painted it on. (I also did this to the banners (paper and ribbon)sticking out under the photo, I just didn’t take a picture of that, but it’s the same technique.)
I also whitewashed the background papers the light one sticking out from behind the black paper. Because I was using so much blue/teal, I wanted to blend the colors out to not have such a contrast in the colors.
I added water to the whitewashed paper, then added two different colors of mist. Then, I randomly blended out the mist and water with a wet baby wipe. This is the end result:
Adding the rest of the elements on the page, it all came together. I cut out banners from ribbon and paper. The heart is also cut out from the paper.
You can also see that I used a piece of circle chipboard from my stash- I painted it black, added some blue glitter from the kit while the paint was wet, and once dry, I also whitewashed that. :)
I also added some of the blue mists to the ribbon to make it match better. The texture was great, but the color was slightly off from what I had in mind.
I added a couple of flowers- one of them was from last month’s kit that I added pearls to, but I ended up not using it on any projects last month, but it was perfect for this page, so I added one that was similar to that one from my stash.
Thanks for stopping by the Bad Girls Couture blog today!
Next I applied some strokes of Haute Mess Acrylics in “Last Sin” and “C-Note” with a pallet knife, making sure to leave some texture for added interest.
