Bird House

I've signed up to do two pages for an "In this House" chunky swap. The first page is a "bird house". The dimensions for this house is 4-1/2" x 8". I used mat board as my base. I wanted a worn paint look. I first covered the mat board with black gesso and let it dry. Then layered on a dark blue acrylic paint, a turquoise acrylic paint and an antique white acrylic paint. Each of these layers were applied with a credit card and the next layer added while the previous layer was still wet, mixing up the colors a bit. While it was still wet, I used the edge of the credit card to "cut" vertical board lines in the paint.
When the paint dried, I rubbed a heavy grit sand paper over the surface vertically.
Then I mixed some antique white acrylic paint with glazing liquid and rubbed it over the surface, wiping off all excess at the same time. Here's what the front of the page looks like after adding embellishments:
Close up of portal. Bird stamped on transparency sheet with black StaZon ink, with alcohol inks dabbed on back, layered onto white paper then onto brown card stock that was edged with cosmic copper Brilliance ink.
Close up of window. Image of girl was layered onto brown card stock, all covered with netting. Piece of bamboo skewer glued to bottom of window.

For the back, I wanted to do a variation on the technique Tim Holtz showed for his March challenge ( I use this one a lot). I cut out the house shape from manila folders. I stamped two bird stamps using gesso and let it dry.

I placed this in a cardboard box and sprayed on three different home made sprays with perfect pearls added and used a heat tool to dry and move the colors around.

I then sprayed on plain purple dye on the bottom and added more of the other sprays as needed to intensify the colors.

Here's what it looks like dry and the combos I used to make the sprays for this project. The background changes in intensity and glimmer depending on the light and how you move it around.

I used the same two stamps with black Archival ink and off set the images a bit to create fore front and background images. I like how the gesso absorbs some of the ink from the sprays and also gives a bit of a resist. I also stamped the word "fly" on the top.

I adhered this to the back of the page, inked the edges with black StaZon ink, added a quote and my name for the swap.