All about Fall actylic album cover with ARTplorations

Hello my dear crafty friends and welcome to my new Mixed Media tutorial.

This time I decided to make something old/something  new (no borrowed or blue... ).

So the acrylic album cover  and decoupage paper are totally old. I think I have them  for at least 5 years, since the days when those albums were trendy. My ARTplorations stencils are totally new as this is my second month on the team. So with some imagination and my own never used techniques I made a very textured fall album cover and I think it's what Mixed Media is about: you never know what you are getting when you finish your project. 

Step by step instructions:

1. Cover  your acrylic album cover with tissue/decoupage paper from the back side. Use decoupage medium of any kind  and let it totally dry. I used ESF medium as this is my very favorite one.

2.Cover the bare acrylic front  (that's the reason we glued tissue over the back) with a thin layer of Crackle medium and let it dry. Don't try to cover the entire surface; make some wide strokes and cover the corners mostly.Let the crackle medium dry.

3. Paint over the dry crackle with brown chalk paint and make a few wide strokes from the top to bottom. Don't try to cover the whole piece and do not paint over the first paint layer. You will see some crackles and we still can see a lot of background tissue.

4. Use your ARTplorations stencils with texture paste and make some brick background around the cover; add flowers in the middle and add a bird on the right side of the piece. 

5. Cover the wet texture paste with embossing powders of your favorite colors. As I thought about fall theme I used yellow, brown and a bit of green. Heat emboss the powders and don't afraid of hot acrylic cover. Those covers are totally durable and can be heat embossed.

6. Now play a  bit with more paints. mists and  powders: all of those are added from the front heat embossed side of the cover. Add letter stickers to make your album title and don't afraid to mist the letters too. Your Mixed Media cover is all done and you can add pages into your 8*8'' fall album.

ARTplorations stencils used for this piece:

Happy Flowers,Some birds, Gridlocked