The Craftarage Studio: Caged Heart

Thursday, 26 July 2018

Caged Heart

Hello lovelies, and welcome to my post for Itsy Bitsy. I have been playing with the gorgeous Little Birdie Chalk Paints again for this project.

The chalk paints are stunning to work with, so smooth and a really nice thickness for good coverage. I decided to try something new and design a sculpture piece. So, I started with a glass coaster, polystyrene ball and a 3D cardboard heart. I glued them together then wrapped them in masking tape.

(The masking tape is better to work on than the polystyrene and glass. Some mediums don't particularly like manmade materials so if they are wrapped in masking tape, which is made of paper, mediums work much better on the surface.)

I wanted to add some texture using Cheese Cloth, but with added structure. So I used PowerTex.

PowerTex requires you to put the fabric directly in to the stiffener covering the entire piece of the fabric, squeeze out the excess then wrap the wet fabric around the substrate. I poured some of the stiffener on to a plastic plate, cut squares of cheese cloth, dipped them in to the stiffening liquid, squeezed out the excess and wrapped it around the heart, draping the fabric over the ball.

I did this numerous times with the cheese cloth until the substrate was covered. The stiffener dries pretty quickly so the fabric can be shaped and moved in to the correct position until you are happy with it. When the fabric stiffener had dried completely, I painted the heart shaped with Faded Denim Chalk Paint and the bottom with Rainy Day Chalk Paint.

I then sprayed the heart shape with Wild Rose Alcohol Splash and let the ink run down and drip to the base of the substrate. When the Wild Rose had dried, I sprayed over the top with Golden Soot Alcohol Splash and again, let it run down the sides.

I wanted to make the shape of the heart more prominent. Using rusty wire, I created a 3D wire heart to fit around the heart shape on top of the substrate.