Dragonfly Collage {Part 2}

 

This is the second part of the Dragonfly Collage tutorial (click here if you need to review the first part of the tutorial). Your piece should be dry and your wings colored in. Today, we are going to apply some glaze and alcohol inks. Until you get the hang of applying the glaze, my advice is to add a little more glaze (Glossy Accents) than you think you might need. If there is too little of the glaze, then there will be dry areas, making the alcohol inks less likely to migrate across your design. 

The alcohol inks, on the other hand, should be used sparingly. A drop of alcohol ink can travel quite far – obscuring the designs below it. Light colors of ink can go (one drop at a time) in the middle of the design, but darker colors should be dropped at the very edges.

Continued from the Dragonfly Collage {Part 1}:

11. Squeeze Glossy Accents onto the design. You want to begin with about a 1 1/2 inch puddle of the glaze – remember to add more if there are any dry areas after you begin spreading. You want to coat the paper to the edge of the stamped background.

12. Gently spread the glaze with the foam brush. You want to leave a layer of glaze over the surface – if you press too hard, then the glaze will be too thin. Add more glaze as necessary so that all portions are glazed.

13. Add 3 drops of the Light Walnut Alcohol ink – allow to spread for about 10 seconds.

14. Add a single drop of the Apricot colored alcohol ink. Have the Aqua Blue alcohol ink ready to drop on top of the Apricot.

15. Note that the Apricot ink "pushes" the Light Walnut ink out of the way – use this to your advantage. Fresh drops of color can move ink out of the way a little – and where they meet little crispy edges of color develop and settle in the glaze. This adds beautiful texture once the piece had dried.

16. Put two drops of Aqua Blue on top of the Apricot ink – the two colors will mix together to create an olive tone of ink. Don't worry if some of the Apricot doesn't mix completely, the technique creates random (but beautiful!) results.

17. At this point, the alcohol ink might be overwhelming the design, so it's time to add a few drops of the colorless blender solution. This will dilute the ink colors that are spreading on the glaze, plus it will push them around a little. Notice that we are trying to keep the area over the dragonfly relatively free of color.

18. Add a drop of Walnut (not the Light Walnut) ink in the corners. You may have to do all four corners, but my design had so much dark color in the lower right that it wasn't necessary. Allow the Walnut color to migrate a little towards the center.

19. Add a few drops of Canary Yellow and Warm Gray over the dragonfly image. Let them move for about 10 seconds through the glaze.

20. Using the foam paintbrush that you used to apply the glaze, carefully drag darker colors around the perimeter of the background. You might dab a little here and there, trying to balance out the left side and right side, so that they are equally (more or less) dark at the edges.

21. Find a flat place for your piece to dry and leave untouched for at least 12 hours for the glaze to set up. The colors will diffuse and settle – each piece will be unique!

All that's left to do is trim and mount! After cutting the image out, it fits nicely onto a 3 1/8 x 4 1/8 layer (we used black mat board for a sturdy surface). Adhere the glazed piece to the layer with plenty of adhesive (I used an Scotch ATG gun). We taped a 6×6 piece of patterned paper (Evening Roost 6×6 paper from Memory Box) to a 6 1/4 x 6 1/4 piece of black mat board – the warm tones in the glazed piece look great with the shades of the patterned paper. Finally we mounted things together with small pieces of foam mounting tape to give it a little "lift".

Look closely at your finished piece – I love the way that the color drifts and mixes around the piece. Good luck with your own project!