Sunday, January 27, 2013

Frenchified Plaster Plaque

This is a great plaque!  It's heavy plaster and has beautiful relief detailing on it.  As I often do, I forgot to take a before shot in my zest to work on it.  But honestly, it wasn't awful when I found it,  it was just that the waterslide transfer in the centre panel was peeling and much of it had already flaked off.  So it just needed my love.
Here is what I did:

First I cleaned off what was left of the waterslide.  Then I painted the centre panel in assorted layers of blue shades to give it an aged look.  Sooooo easy when you're working on plaster.  I found the vintage perfume graphic on pinterest, sized it to fit using my graphics software and since I was going to use the wax paper method to transfer it, I printed it onto a prepped wax paper sheet on my crappy little ink jet printer.  If you're not familiar with the wax paper method for transferring, you can click here for links to several transfer method tutorials including the wax paper method.   It is becoming one of my favorite methods.  I will say though, that while I do get great results, great care is needed not to smudge the image, both before and after it's transferred.  My patience has been tested many a time using this method!  In fact, I smeared my first attempt with this one and had to clean it off and start over.  The steam was coming out of my ears and at that very moment my Mama called and distracted me so I could cool down.  Thank you Mama!! Once the image was on the plaque I sprayed it quickly with several clear coats and let it dry before I smudged it again.  I have a hard time waiting sometimes and that's when I screw things up.  Can you relate?  Anyway, I had to tone down the gold as it was a little strong so I used a bright gold and then went over it with a metallic espresso to soften it even more.  I also touched a little espresso onto the centre panel to age it a little more.

Pretty eh?



AND if you'd like to grab the graphic, here it is.  I found it on pinterest and it was an 'uploaded by user' graphic so I really don't know it's origins.  But thank you user, hope you don't mind me sharing. 


Ciao!!

No comments:

Post a Comment