Show Your Face on Friday - Infusions!

Hello Followers and Friends and Welcome to Magpieheaven. All this month at the fabulous Show Your Face on Friday blogspot with Kim Dellow here we're being inspired. I'm repeatedly inspired by all the beautiful work that the other participants in the link up share and I will be responding to the work that most speaks to me this week and learning from it for next time. This week, though, I am including some faces I did in my journal using a new product I saw demo'd by Leandra Franich and Linda Brown last Sunday at Stevenage Stamperama - Infusions! Linda's blog can be found here. She always inspires me when I see her demonstrate her incredible skills, especially with paints and fabrics.

Because this was an experimental venture in my journal I took no step out photos of how I created the background and how the faces emerged from the colours and textures within it. I just had so much fun playing with using the new powders with different glazes - Satin and Metallic mainly - Treasure Gold and Grunge Paste.

Infusions are made by PaperArtsy and they are tiny bottles of coloured dies and walnut crystals, which you can activate with water and fix with glazes or a fixative spray. The tiny granules go into so many different colours as they are activated, but over-working will bring the walnut crystals to the fore, so if you don't want brown to pre-dominate you have to fix the effect as soon as you are pleased with it. It was so exciting to watch Lin Brown and Leandra experiment with something so new and to make discoveries about the effect of using it on and with different materials like Fresco Paints, Grunge Paste, Treasure Gold and so on.

When I looked at the experiments on my pages, I was reminded of moths' wings and how I once wrote a story of a girl who longed for a moth-wing dress stitched with spider thread. I liked the effect of the Hot Picks moth stamped in black Archival and highlighted with white pen against the background.

I experimented with Grunge Paste through a couple of stencils, mixing the paste first with Infusions and then, when it was dry, sprinkling more powder on and spritzing. I begin the Robin Laws Storyteller's Art course today, so these 'moth ladies' may make an appearance in a story in the coming days.

My magpie guide had to make an appearance, of course, chattering away and helping me to remember characters that seemed to have dissolved long ago. I wanted to create the effect of the ladies with their delicate moth wing dresses appearing out of the twilight in the garden.

Thank you so much for stopping by Magpieheaven today. I do hope you'll have time to link up a face to Kim's blog this week and to be inspired by her art and that of the other contributors.