View Finder

I misplaced a very useful, home-made tool today and had to make another one. I thought I'd share the idea as you may find it useful too!

I call it a view finder and in the example above, I've placed it over a paper with a random design to see what might look best and where I should cut it.

It's made from a transparent sheet of plastic (I used a printer transparency but clear plastic packaging would also work).

I drew lines on the plastic in the exact dimensions of my tag with a permanent marker.

But it could be any size.

Maybe you make a lot of 4" x 6" cards or work with a particular size of canvas panel.

Just draw lines for the dimensions you need.

I find having a neutral border really helpful so I place masking tape around the edges next to the lines.

Scrapbook papers with many design areas can make deciding what section to use a bit difficult.

So I just use my handy-dandy view finder and play around with all the possibilities and, when I find the right spot, I know just where to cut.

Besides framing the view, this tool is good for holding small bits in place while you make up your mind where to place them permanently.

I'd love to hear from you if you decide to make one--let me know what you think!

Observations

Do you ever have this nagging feeling that you want to be creative amd make something but you just can't get started, you don't know what to do and you lack direction?

That's been my dilemma lately, it appears my muse has taken a vacation and some say when that happens, the best thing you can do is just show up and begin without her.

So I hoped that making this tag (an exercise in image transfer) would help and I suppose it did.

My paying job was always fraught with pressure and deadlines and some say they work better under these conditions. It's hard to accept but I think this may also be true for me.

Lady Huron

Liquitex light modeling paste, Distress clear rock candy crackle paint and shiny black Scribbles were the mediums used to link this tag to Simon's Monday blog challenge where this week's theme is cleverly named don't cut, just paste.

I haven't combined a paste layer with crackle medium before but it worked out well here because it created a uniformly flat surface for pasting on collage elements.

Let me explain.

First, I took a plain manila tag and covered it with several layers of victorian velvet Distress stain to get a rich, dark background.

Then I used a Prima damask stencil and modeling paste which absorbed some of the stain, tinting it to a lighter shade of pink.

Next came the crackle paint which I applied with a palette knife. It settled into the recessed areas of the damask at a perfect thickness for crackling and was enhanced by working in thinned-out white acrylic paint after it dried.

The banner was cut from scrapbook paper and distressed to match the photo. The black, dimensional dots applied to the photo and tag borders were applied using a 3D paint called Scribbles.

Why Lady Huron? She was named in honor of new music I listened to while making this tag. The CD, titled Strange Trails, by a group called Lord Huron was very inspirational and I had to give due credit!