Today I am going to show you how to creat this fun mixed media influenced border.

This tutorial is adapted from and influenced by a tutorial I saw by Dina Wakley a while back. She is amazing at inking and using mixed media techniques on her pages. I am veeery inspired by her lately. Lets get started!

For this step you can use any kind of text paper that you have on hand. Old books work really well. For my page I tore up a page from a vintage math book that I had laying around.

You can use any type of paint that you have on hand. I happened to have Liquitex heavy body acrylics – but any kind of acrylic paint will work just fine.

Keep the paint light or watered down so that you can see the text through the paint. I used a bunch of different colours so that there would be a bunch of layers and provide a sense of depth.

I freehand stitched a vine/leaf pattern onto my page with my sewing machine in a contrasting thread colour (black in this case). You can stitch any sort of design you want – I wanted to keep it organic. Also if you don’t have a sewing machine you could try embroidering or hand stitching on your page, or add a layer of rub ons instead of stitching.

My final touches were rings of gesso that I created by dipping an old glass into the gesso and then stamping them on my page. I also added some deep purple paint splatters. An easy way to create splatters is to use two brushes. Dip one of them into your chosen paint colour and then hold the other one firmly in your non-dominant hand paralell to your workstation. Then bang your paintbrush with the paint over the other paintbrush the paint will splatter onto your layout keeping your hands fairly clean. I also added some chipboard buttons from the such Such Sweet Tierney shop.

There you have it. An easy, fun mixed media border. On mine I didn’t add any other patterned paper or embellishments because I thought it looked complete without anything but feel free to embellish however you want.

We would love to see your creations so upload them to our flickr group.

xo Jeremy

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 2:07 pm and is filed under How To With Jeremy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.