Mixed Media tutorial

I found this while surfing today. Hope it inspires someone.

Mixed media influenced border tutorial 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 very 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 colors 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 color (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 color and then hold the other one firmly in your non-dominant hand parallel 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.