Coasting along...

My lovely friend Louise from Zuzu Petals 'n Stuff is hosting an altered beer mat swap. Each player is to make 5 altered coasters, send them to Louise and she will then make holes for each one and swap them out among the players, so that each of us will receive 5 in return which we can then make into a mini book. I have not done a swap for ages, and this one sounded like a lot of fun. So here are the ones I made:

I began with some blank beer mats, purchased from Calico Crafts.
I started by giving them a thick coat of Gesso and then added textures with the help of various  stencils and some embossing paste. I wanted them to be like a kind of series, so I used these sultry women images for each one.

The images came from a UK company called Cardmaker's Delight and come as ready printed so called card toppers. I saw these first on the blog of the lovely May and she gave me the link. For me the challenge was to blend them right into my backgrounds, which were created with the help of various acrylic paints and stamps.

I tore most of the images to give them an uneven edge and then blended my matching paint colours over and around them, I partly used my fingers, partly a baby wipe and sometimes added some fine detail with a brush.

Once the paint had dried I added some stamping, mostly in archival ink, but here and there also with paints. Often I stamped over the edge of the torn image as that helps to blend them into the background.

On some of them I also did further stenciling with inks, trying to pick up some of the patterns that were there in the digital images. On one or two I also added a little more texture paste and then blended paints over that again when it was dry.

I added one or two embellishments and each coaster got a sentiment. These are all from the Donna Downey Empowered Words set of stamps.

Well, hope you like my altered beer mats, I have not played with digital images for ages, but have to say, I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for visiting like always and hope you are having a good week!