Seth Apter Journal Play

How do we create a grungy, metallic art journal page?

Seth Apter has a line of stencils, stamps, and die cuts. I have taken a few classes with him & not only are his products unique and different he is a super nice guy and really good teacher! You can buy his products directly from his shop or in your local scrapbook &  paper arts stores.

The start of the adventure...

  Let's start with corrugated cardboard. Inexpensive & easy to find! Add a coat of gesso, lots of stenciling using flexible modeling paste. To get an idea of what this will look like go here. Once this was dry it was time to add some paint. I used DecoArt Media fluid acrylics and painted the background in varying colors of blue/teal, using a bit of Paynes grey with the blues. Once that was dry some random stamping in archival ink gave nice interest & texture. 

Have you always wanted to learn how to shade? 

 Using a fine brush I painted darker on the sides of the raised areas, blending the paint with my finger as I went. This gave some nice depth to the images. Using a hard piece of foam I hit the high points of the stenciled areas with Metallic Luster, this is one of my favorite techniques! Just adds that wonderful, shiny, metal look that is nice & grungy. I used a quote stamp of Seth's as a focal point. His products fit into each other which is too cool, leaving all kinds of options. 

Time for some die cuts! 

I had cut a bunch of shapes from gelliplate papers. Choices.... In the end I was feeling circle-ish. I simply took the 2 inside circles from the Robo Ring die, placing one inside the other and cut. This left me with 3 circle rings and a middle full circle, which I did not use. I stamped on these with archival ink. I also cut the same out of cardboard- about as thick as a cereal box. The trick is to run the die cuts through the machine 2x- as in forward and back (leaving the sandwich in place so the dies do not shift) to cut this heavier material. 

After distressing the edges so no cardboard shows through simply glue down the cardboard circles with a strong glue. I left off the pretty tops to keep the excess paint from getting on them. Fill in the circles with DecoArts crackle paste. When dry the paint on the bottom layer shows through the cracks. 

Let's add a pop of color!

I used fluid acrylic which is enough to color the paste but once dry doesn't cover the crack effect.  Once that was dry I glued my gelliplate cut-outs on top. 

Adding paint on the inside of the circles gave it that depth. Almost done! Adding a key after wrapping a copper metal coil around it and a tag that was painted and stenciled with the word enter. Voila! The tag covered the back pages tab which I had found distracting.

That's it! This was a super fun page to work on, although with all the modeling paste etc. I would work on it, set it aside, work on it. Tip: have a few projects on the go to prevent staring at wet paste willing it to dry faster. You do want to let these pastes dry naturally for maximum effect. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Leave me a comment if there is a project you would like to see on my blog!  

Supplies:

Seth Apter:

  die by Spellbinders- Robo Ring

 stencils by Stencil Girl:

-numbers, story time & urban outsiders 

stamps by Impression Obsession:

-context, journal coins & pattern play

DecoArt Media:

 Fluid Acrylics- cobalt turquoise,  cobalt teal, paynes grey, 

quinacridone burnt orange.

 Crackle Paste   

Metallic Lustre- copper kettle

Americana Acrylic- Lemon Yellow

Ranger: archival ink- jet black

Daler Rowney- black acrylic ink