Welcome! We've been cleaning house, cooking, and decorating for the holidays this past week, as I'm sure many of you have too. One of our traditions is that we try to get a few new wooden ornaments made each year for our tree. My husband enjoys working with wood out in his shop when the day are shorter and cooler. Sometimes I toss out requests, and this week he has gotten plenty of them! I scoured magazines and book stores for ornament patterns that I liked and came up empty. It seemed like most of the pattern magazines this year had more crocheted or knitted ornaments than wooden ornaments. So I came home and started flipping through my stamp sets for inspiration when I ran across the My Favorite Things Birdie Brown Polar Bear Pals stamp set. I love those little bears and thought that they would make a great addition to our ornament collaboration! (Rick cuts them with a scroll saw, and I paint them--team effort.)
I picked three of the Polar Bear Pals images to use as references, enlarging them slightly, and gave him a pattern. He cut them out of 1/2" pine. All of those ears were tricky, I'm sure! I wanted to use my Tommy Paints and wax in order to give them a shabby, worn look. The Tommy paint line is an artist quality chalk paint line rather than a craft paint, but I prefer using really good paint since I hope my son will enjoy the ornament collection for years to come.
First I lightly sanded and then painted the cut outs with Tommy Chalk Color Pale Blue paint. Next I used the Tommy Neutral Wax to lightly brush the edges of the wood, making sure to put wax in areas that I wanted to be able to easily sand down to the Pale Blue layer later.
I let both the Pale Blue paint layer and the neutral wax layer dry before painting the ornaments again with white paint.
Here I have sanded down to the Pale Blue layer--or a little past that layer in a couple of places--oops! That's okay--it looks worn and loved that way. Having applied wax to the edges of the cut out made it really simple to sand the white paint off of the blue paint. It's important to get the dust off of the piece after you sand it, or you'll have some extra texture in your paint job. . .
Finally, I penciled the details on, then inked them before painting and shading them. The inking was the one part that I had a little trouble with: first I tried to use one of my Copic 0.5 Multiliners, but it didn't take long for the pen clog up on the chalk paint. I probably should have used a heat tool on the white paint layer to be absolutely sure that it was very dry before trying to do line work, but it felt dry to me. I also tried an extra fine point Sharpie, and I managed to clog that too. So I just keep trying to clean off my marker tips for long enough to get my lines all in. Again, next time I will use the heat tool or let the top layer dry over night before putting my lines on.
Other Tommy Chalk Paint colors that I used besides Pale Blue and White were Ruby, Lime, and Turquoise. For the really light shading, I found that my Zig Clean Color watercolors paired with a small water brush worked very well for shading on the white chalk paint. I used mostly a pale gray and a pale purple for shading (all colors listed below). After my paint was dry, I used a scrap of terry cloth towel to apply and rub my Neutral Wax coat into the ornaments for a long-lasting finish. The wax protects the chalk paint finish and makes the surface nice and smooth. After that, I screwed some eye hooks into the top of each ornament, and they are now tree-ready! I'll have a few other decorative or gift projects to share in the next couple of days--hope you don't mind a change of pace from cards once in a while. Thanks for stopping by,
Polar Bear Pals -- My Favorite Things Stamps
Tommy Chalk Colors: White, Pale Blue, Ruby, Lime, Turquoise
Zig Clean Color Brushes: Light Gray, Lilac, Deep Violet, Deep Red, Light Pink, Persian Green, Mid Green
Small Waterbrush
1/2" clear pine/1/2" screw eyes
