Try It Out Tuesday : Mixed Media (continued)

Last time, I'd just covered a leaf with lutradur in an altered book.  Sandy wondered how I was going to colour it 'after the fact', as she put it...well, it's surprisingly easy.  Pretty much, the lutradur coloured itself.  If you remember, we stuck it on with acrylic adhesive.  So, when I applied the heat gun to distress the lutradur, some of it started to burn, creating lovely colours that looked perfect with the leaf.  You do need to be careful with the heat gun when doing this; get it too close to the page and you may find that the paint under the lutradur, and the page itself, will buckle and swell a bit.  It's an interesting look, and any swelling immediately disappears as it cools, but better not to produce it in the first place!

So... I started at the edges of the page, creating a very distressed look, and then worked over the rest of the page.

I then singed the lutradur a bit more, and added some colour round the edges using a watercolour crayon, before rubbing a glitter Markal stick across the page, giving it some texture as well as a slightly frosted look.

This is the final piece; the frosted effect doesn't photograph all that well, but I hope you get the idea.  Lutradur really doesn't have to be coloured before you use it; you can colour it at any stage of the process.  I hope you'll give it a try!