The Project-Color begins for covers

This is the 2nd stage of 3, finished for the cover colors

Good Morning, for those of you in the North and other states in the path of Hurricane Sandy, I hope that you are safe and incurred minimum damage from her havoc, I keep you in my prayers.
Yesterday, was not scheduled for the cover colors, but there is rain predicted for later in the week and I needed a non-humid, warm day, and yesterday was it, I need one more today to finish the color.  For those of you that make cards and love techniques, here is a short tutorial on the process.

For a normal sized card, I use my table inside and a spray box or open spray folder for this process, but this 22"X30" card called for a little bit more real estate, so outside we went.  If you look to the left you will see one of my challenges for this project, his name is Cass and he is an outside cat, believes with all his heart that the front patio is his and his alone, what ever goes on there must be for his benefit or amusement.  This table is my potting table, paint table, stripping furniture table, it gets a lot of use.  So for this project it got a hefty dose of plastic, I then used the painters tape to mount both sheets to the top.  The tape serves 2 purposes, it keeps it from blowing away if there is a breeze and it also helps to keep the project flat while drying.  When you apply the paint the paper swells with the absorbtion of water and if it is not held down it will bow and warp as it dries. My first coat of paint is acyrlic that I sprayed from a fine mist spray bottle and then brushed out with a foam brush.

After the spraying with acrylic the paper needs to dry completely, you can see in the above picture the bowing and warping of the paper as it dries.  You want the splatters and patches to get the end result.  If you are using card stock it will dry quicker and if you are impatient you can take a rubber stamp heat gun to it.  When the paper is completely dry, I then do a process with a rubber stamp background and gesso, I have several unmounted background stamps specifically for this process.

 I keep a dozen or so of these foam brushes on hand, you can generally find them at the hardward store for about 50cents each.  I also always have gesso on hand, it is one of my favorite studio tools.

 I will be using the stamp bowed as you see it here, I want to avoid the edges as much as possible and just want the white swirls in patches randomly across the paper.

As you can see I load the stamp moderately and this will give me 3 or 4 images, I work from the left corner down and across the sheet.  When using gesso with your stamps, it is important to wash that stamp immediately following the process, dried gesso on your stamps is not good for them and is a bear to get off after it has dried.  If for some reason it does dry on your stamp, soak in a warm bath of dishwasher soap and then take an old tooth brush the remove the softened gesso.

The final step in this first process is to let the gessoed paper dry completely and then with a fine grid sandpaper, sand the entire sheet, this will raise the tooth on the paper and pit some of the gessoed area. If you are doing this process with cardstock, you want to sand very lightly as the cardstock is much thinner, it is best to do a small test sheet first, so that you are able to watch how the sand paper raises the top layer of your cardstock.  This is preparing the paper for the final step, which is applying the alcohol inks.  The alcohol inks will give depth and added color plus it will add a warmth to the paper.

Thanks to all who are following and I hope that maybe I have shared some techniques for you to try with your projects, hopefully tomorrow we will have the final stage completed and the covers will have their color, have a wonderful day, hugs