Tips & Techniques – Creating Metallic Elements

This is a doozy of a technique, and you may need some help getting everything organised and set out before use.

You need:

Raw Chipboard letters and a piece of chipboard for the base of your word.

Beading wire and beading tools such as small pliers and needle nose grippers

Hot Glue Gun

Heat Gun

Pigment Ink and Embossing powder

Acrylic paints in Red, Turquoise and Chocolate.

Crackle Medium

Various stamps

small metal objects such as belt buckles, watch parts, wire etc

small stamped images and scraps of patterned paper

Step One:

Start by placing all of your scraps on the chipboard base piece and adhering them as normal. You can see that I spray painted my chipboard letters first in gold – that is just optional. Lay out your letters and elements so that they are overlapping – don’t worry if things are hanging off the edge as they will be kept in place by the adhesive and the hot glue gun.

Step Two:

Once you have all of your elements in place, you need to wire them on or attach them with glue (I use PVA) or your hot glue gun. I have wired on my buckle to the letter “A”, then, with my normal glue, I have attached all the paper bits on the bottom layer. Then with my glue gun I have attached the letters overlapping on top.

Step Three:

Paint the tops of your chipboard letters in red paint and allow to dry for a few minutes. Then paint a layer of Crackle Medium generously over the top and blow dry with the heat gun until it is “tacky” to the touch.

Then paint over a layer of chocolate paint over the crackle medium and dry with the heat gun on a low temp.

The brush over the top of the dry, crackled letters with small strokes of the turquoise – use a dry brush with not much paint on it to give the weathered and rusted metal look we are after.

Once that layer of paint has dried, press some inked stamps over any of the raised edges of the letters – the messier the applicationo the better. We want it to look “collage – like”.

Spread some of your embossing powder over the stamped areas and blow or tap off the excess. Heat and emboss with the heat gun as you would normally do – just be careful not to touch the real metal elements as they will burn your fingers!

Finish the whole metal look now by watering down some of the chocolate paint and painting it around the edges of the letters to look like shadows. Then grab your pinecone ink and rub that around the edges of the letters and metal elements too, giving a deeper, richer feeling to the whole thing.

Have fun everyone! Please be careful with your hot glue gun and your heat gun – I lost a few layers of skin doing this thing, but it was worth it! lol It’s now hanging proudly on my Studio door and I am going to make one for each of my kids too – betters than those poxy clown letters!

Sares xx