A Mixed Media Layout Tutorial!

Step by Step paper crafting tutorials

Hey Hey My fellow Nerds!!! It’s Sarah here and I ALMOST forgot to post my tutorial today!! It’s 11:55pm here right now, so I’m technically still getting this out on Tuesday!! HA! I do apologize for my tardiness! This will be worth the wait I promise!!

I wanted to share with you how I made this gorgeous layout! I have to admit, I think it’s my favourite so far! I just love all the beautiful colours and the die cut title!

If you want to make a background like this, it’s actually pretty easy! You just need either a stencil, or in this case I die cut a cut file from The Cut Shoppe and I taped it onto my white cardstock with washi tape first.

Then I used a spatula and some clear embossing paste by Wendy Vecchi and spread a thin layer all over the die cut to get that masked effect. Now there’s a couple things I learned when I did this.

1. this dries very fast, so when I went to take off the “mask” it had already dried onto the white paper a bit, so using pink paper wasn’t the best idea.
2. I think (but don’t quote me for sure) that using a light layer of gesso on the paper that you are using as a mask (on the underside) might help it to not stick to the base paper before using it!

Ok! Onto the next step…this one is the fun one! Once it’s all dried, you paint over it! You can use a ton of different mediums for this, but I love the watercolor effect! I love the muted colors and just the way it runs on the paper! So fun!

I chose 3 different colors and just painted on my layout in strips. I used a decent amount of water too, which is why I backed my cardstock with a sheet of patterned paper…plus I like the way it looks too!

You might notice that this picture of the finished background looks a little different than the actual finished picture. Once I was done with the watercolors and they dried, I wasn’t crazy about the pink…so I took some pink acrylic paint and mixed it with a little water and just swished it over the watercolor pink and it just made all the difference in the world!

So there you have it! A gorgeous mixed media background that is really quite easy!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sarah