ARTastic 3T's in March ...

Welcome to our March round of ARTastic 3T's - Tips, Tricks and Techniques where each month one of our creative team will show you are few quick tips and/or techniques to use on your layouts.

This month we feature Elaine Schoof with a lovely tutorial to help jazz up that chipboard we all have sitting in our stashes to create something special for our layouts.

Using chipboard on your Layouts

Raw chipboard looks great on layouts but I also love to alter them.  I am going to show you how I altered this chipboard tree for a layout I did.

The materials I have used for dressing up this chipboard tree is gesso paint, ink, stamp and buttons.

Firstly paint your chipboard with gesso. It's up to you if you do one or two coats. Here I have done one coat which makes it a duller white and also the paint strokes are more obvious.

Once the gesso is dry,  stamp over top. I have used a script stamp but any background type stamp works and looks great. To add some dimension I added buttons on random

holes of the tree.  To make it more interesting I have used twine with the buttons, one as a knot and the other as a bow. For the other buttons I have used cotton string. Using buttons

allows you to add colours from your layout to your chipboard, tying it in together.

For my layout I have also used chipboard butterflies. To make these, you glue the raw butterflies to the back of pattern paper. Once it's dry cut around the butterfly and sand down the edges with sandpaper to smooth down the edges. It also can add a small white edge to your butterfly. Add stick on crystals for a bit of bling. This method works well on solid chipboard shapes.

Here is my finished layout using my chipboard tree and butterflies. Two butterflies I left raw and sponged some brown ink on the edges, just to soften them up.

TIP- if you use chipboard shapes that presses out of surrounding chipboard, you can use the negative as a mask for texture paint or misting as I have done here.

We'd love to see what you can do with your chipboard.  Perhaps you could try this technique and add some chipboard to a page for our current challenge.  Remember you have until the end of the month to submit your entry.