The making of the substrate

I often don't talk about the process of how I make the ATC cards or the leaves. Sometimes I use plain old fabric or paper. I know I have talked about the fabric paper but I haven't shown one in progress. However there are some other methods that I have used that are really fun and great for creative warm ups. The first one presented here is the fabric paper. You start with a piece of fabric, muslin works great. The specifics can be found in Beryl Taylor's book Mixed Media Explorations. I highly recommend this book. You will not believe what she is able to do with fabric paper.
The second technique is using scrap book paper. I am not a fan of using to many pre-made items exclusively as then there isn't as much creating. So I use a lot of these items as prompt or substrate. I started with a page of appealing scrap book paper. I then painted, decoupaged magazine text, book text, images, and then I painted some more. I then stamped the heck out of the paper. This is fun, you can use all of your stamps and not really worry too much about color, organization, composition etc. The goal is move fast and furious to lay down an interesting (notice I didn't say organized) background. Once this is done you can decoupage more images, use paper tape etc.

The third and final substrate is using mixed media or water color paper. For this particular exercise I used gelatos which are made by Faber-Castell. These are amazing little tools. You color with them like a crayon, and then use what to mix the colors. They produce the most fantastic colorful backgrounds. I tend to work muted so this is a great way for me to use some very bright colors. Over the next few weeks you will see some of the substrates used for ATC cards. In the previous post the leaves were made from these substrates also. Happy Creating.