Heart of My Home

Lovely Readers - do we have a treat for you today!
Karolina has simply outdone herself... Her new artwork is something you have never seen before on my blog! :)
Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for an altering feast.

Hello, everyone!

Karolina here and today, I have for you something very special, a unique object with a soul of its own. Are you ready? :)

In general, I love to give second life to things - why? Apart from it being a very eco thing to do, I also love the idea of giving ordinary objects a completely new purpose, a new destiny of sorts.

So today I have for you a brand new altered project of mine - a typewriter!

Apart from having a beautiful artsy typewriter at home, I also had this idea to treat it as a kind of an original display for photos.

I can already feel that this thing will be the very heart of my studio and home.

If you want to see how I altered my typewriter, there's a step by step video waiting for you below.

First, I of course started with thorough cleaning and drying and then covered everything with Heavy White Gesso.

I love all kinds of distressing effects so you will see how I used different media to create a vintage, time-worn look for my machine.

The best products to achieve this kind of effect are Finnabair's new Art Alchemy Brilliance Waxes (I used Fire Ruby); here I combined them with new Sparks Acrylic Paints (Fairy Wings and Raven Black).

Thanks to these products I easily managed to give my typewriter a distinctive character of its own. They have a beautiful shine and I must admit I fell in love with the Waxes and Sparks right away.

I wanted to created some special textured touches so in some spots I used Modeling Paste and Graphite Art Extravagance Texture Paste through different stencils.

To add even more interesting texture, I recommend trying out new Finnabair's Stone Effect Paste - I used Pumice applied with a silicone brush here and there.

After that I glued some embellishments with Soft Gels (both Gloss and Matte).

I stamped a canvas strips (making a cute ribbon this way) with some of my favorite inspiring sentiments from Finnabair's stamps sets.

I also used the stamps to do some freehand stamping here and there on the whole machine.

I love all kinds of 3D elements to decorate my art with so of course I couldn't resist adding them here.

The metal embellishments add a scpecial kind of charm to my typewriter and really emphasize its vintage beauty.

There are also stickers on the keyboard - I put a bit of gel medium on them which created a sort of a glass effect with a pretty glossy shine. You can also get ready made 'buttons' like that - check out Finnabair's Typewriter Words and Numbers.

The spaces between the buttons are filled with cheescloth and sisal fibers.

A delicate final touch of green Sparks paints and copper Wax - I'm not too keen on green and red but somehow they worked perfectly here.

Finally, everything was ready to place my family photos.

So are you ready for my video to see how it all happpened? :)

I hope you'll enjoy it and if you have any questions at all, please leave them in the comments.

 

I just love altering objects, especially adding the final touches.

It's always such a special point in the creative process - just me and my artwork, a private moment of a magical dialogue between me and my art.

I truly hope you will love my typewriter as much as I do. :)

And I hope I tempted you to alter some interesting objects in your house.

Happy creating!
Karolina

Products used: