Some Colourful Monkey Business....

Hi everyone ;) This is Katrina Bricknell here and I'm excited to share my first post here as a DT! I love working with WOW chipboard and thought I would share my favourite way to dress up chippie.

For the simple LO I'm sharing today I've used 2 different WOW products. First one being the "Daddy and Me" title, second is the cute little monkey out of the "Cute Zoo Animal Pack".You can see that with the adorable animal package you receive 6 cute little animals, and that they are all a great size to work with - so even though it's a multiple pack WOW certainly do not scrimp on the size of their product!!! BTW - a little tip: as basic as it sounds, when removing items like the animals from the surrounding chipboard cut the joins with a blade, don't try to push it out like I did on my first piece of chippie like that - it will usually end with tears :( Carefully cut your precious one out and it will reduce any damage done ;)

I've a very basic stash of painting supplies so don't feel you need to go out and buy a heap of stuff to get a similar effect I have here. Some basic water based paint (I've used Twinkling H2O's and some basic yellow acrylic), Dimensional Magic coupled with a little patience is really all you need.


So This is the end result of what I have been working on with these two products...

First things first - if you're a messy artist/scrapper like me you can get paint absolutely EVERYWHERE!!! So put down some paper where you are going to be working ;) I learned the hard way that even water based paint can be difficult to remove from different surfaces LOL

It probably sounds really basic but work out what colours your chippie is going to be painted in. WOW chippie takes paint remarkably well - If I'm working with a single colour it usually doesn't require a base coat, however for the little monkey I've done a bit of shading so a base colour was required. I chose a the lightest brown that I was using for the item for the base, That way I could build shading up with the darker colours. The word 'Me' has been left bare as I was doing it in a single colour.

The second step involves what is probably the most complicated work - it's shading. Work with the lighter colours first, and then build up to the darkest colours. For the base coat I've used Twinkling H2O 'Burnt Umber' and shaded with varying degrees of watered down 'cinnamon brown'. The belly and face of the monkey have been base coated with ginger peach in readiness for a yellow acrylic coating once all the other colours had dried. Be careful colouring area's that are close together as the colours will run into each other - this is where patience comes in. You are best to wait for layers to dry before moving onto an adjoining area... In total it took me approximately 4 hours to get all my layers of paint and shadowing down on the monkey and title - you don't need to be as fussy as I am (I'm a renowned perfectionist LOL) and could easily get away without the shading, these little animals are so cute they don't really need too much embellishing :)

Then comes the fun stuff, you finally see your piece coming together. As mentioned previously I painted the monkeys face with yellow acrylic. once this was dry I used some little black bling for the eyes and some black flocking for the nose - got to love a pattable nose!!!! Use the design guides on the chippie to guide where the nose, eyes and mouth are... When painting even if you go over them you should still see the indentation of the guides to help you ;)

The next stage - adding the colour to other areas ('me' - twinkling H2O 'blue grass') and defining the item with dimensional magic once the paint has all dried!. I love DM on chippie - it's great for finishing off an item and adding a bit of professional. Don't be alarmed if the colour of your chippie changes to a milky colour whilst the DM is drying (like you can see above) - it WILL return to normal - I promise :)

Then the absolute FINAL step - arranging your gorgeously coloured and finished chippie onto your LO. Mine is a very simple LO for this example.

Daddy and Me

I hope you enjoyed this mini-tutorial on simple painting and effects on chipboard. Don't be afraid of colour, it's so easy to paint up the WOW chippie and the result is so worth every minute of effort and patience :)