Poor lonesome friend! - Melt Art Mania

has taken over here too, I am afraid.

I have been hoarding some UTEE for quite some time now but never had the guts to use it with all those awesome techniques like stamping in UTEE or creating high gloss embellishments with UTEE... but this has changed since I read Candy Colwell's "Ranger Melt Art Mania" post over here. Her project is sooo awesome and her stepxstep really gave me the feeling that I could not go wrong. So I tried and this is what I came up with:

Yes, you are right: I had some put aside backgrounds from my various tries to create a yellow background tag for the DDTIO "Yellow, lightbulbs and wire" - challenge.  They were too dark to fit what I wanted with the lightbulb theme, but for using my brand new Stampotique stamps they were just perfect!!!! They are sooo cool - I haven't bought any Stampotique stamps until now, but when I saw these I just had to have them. NOW! *lol

The "melt art" techniques I used were: covering the die cut bat with some layers of clear UTEE, which was a lot of fun to do.

Then I stamped the frame image from IndigoBlu partially on top of the tag and covered the image with black embossing powder for heat embossing.

Next I experimented on stamping into UTEE - which was my very first time (I always was afraid of breaking my stamps by getting them stuck forever in UTEE or something like that ;).

For a first try I was quite content with the outcome. (So, please, be gentle with me *lol).

I also used melt art as a resist by stamping the Tim Holtz barbed wire image and covering with Ranger Ultra Fine Detail clear embossing powder for heat embossing. Afterwards I blended the area carefully with "black soot" Distress ink, trying to create a kind of border.

The eyes of the poor lonesome friend were heat embossed using black embossing powder too to make them look more intense.

The Stampotique Owl Tree image was the perfect background image for the sad scenery.

The tag's background texture was added by using a LaBlanche "burlap" stencil, DI "pumice stone" and a blending tool. I masked the spot, where I later stamped our "friend" on by covering this area with a cut out shape of the image.

Then, by pure accident, I stumbled upon a really cool "technique" while pimping up the ribbon I wanted to use with this tag:

as the ribbon was originally bright white with only the barb wire image printed on it, I first blended it with DI "black soot" to match the dark look of the tag. As the ribbon was a rather shiny material and less absorbent than cotton or linen for example, the DI stayed very much on top, which I only realized when I stained the ribbon using Distress paint "wild honey", dapping dots directly onto the ribbon... which caused the ink to build black edges around the yellow stains...which looked more than just perfect for the tag's theme!!!!

Cool, huh? I heat dried the ribbon and adhered it to my tag after I had distressed the edges and blended them with DI "pumice stone".

Now let's hope someone soon will find the courage to play with our sad friend! ;)

Most images were stamped with my favourite two inks: black jet archival ink from Ranger and Distress ink "black soot", so I enter Simon Says Stamp and Show's "Favorite Ink" challenge with this tag.

Hope you like my tag! Thanks for stopping by again!

Hugs,
die amelie x