Enjoy the little things

Hello everyone,

and welcome to my blog where today I have the second helping of inspiration for the challenge over at Country View Challenges. The theme is 'crackle' and it was chosen by the lovely Evelyn !
I did a mini art journal spread with a little tutorial and this is the finished project :

And here is how I made it :

I painted the pages with Dylusions paints using a blending tool.

This is what that looked like..

Next, I painted Distress Crackle paint over the dried pages. 

While that was drying I stamped the mouse to add to the page. I had coloured this cat on holiday with my coloured pencils so I coloured the mouse in the same way. I later added the milk bottle...

After the Distress Crackle had dried I painted over it with Paperartsy Crackle Glaze, hoping I would get some big crackles... 

While that dried I stamped the milk bottle and coloured that too. 

Unfortunately the second layer of Crackle didn't work so I went back to the Distress Crackle and put another layer of that over the top and that did seem to work.

I accentuated the crackles with DecoArt antiquing cream.

Next I used a Tim Holtz stamp set (CMS260)  and some brown Archival Ink to add some more interest.

This is how it looked; I also went around the edges with the same ink pad to grunge it up a little more. 

Next, I decided it needed some white so I took this Tim Holtz stencil (Dot Fade) and some Deco Art Crackle paste and added that to both pages. 

It didn't crackle very much but I was happy with how it looked. 

The mouse (by Katzelkraft) and the cat (Crazy Cats by Tim Holtz CMS251) were stamped on the page to get the little details like the whiskers. You can then cut these off the stamped images you have coloured. 

Of course it didn't stamp very well on the white dots but it looks OK in the end. Here I have added some more stamping using the other stamp from the Tim Holtz set (CMS260) and some orange Archival & Distress Inks. 

After adhering the cat, mouse and bottle to the pages I added some shading underneath using a Faber Castell Big Brush marker. 

And this is the finished result ! I added a sentiment from an Eclectica stamp set by Paperartsy (EKD02).

Thank you for stopping by today. I hope you will play along with us this month !