Majestic Medallions, Seth Apter Style

Hello, everyone!  Welcome, I'm so happy to have you join me today.  It's the first day of July and I can't believe how quickly the summer is going!  I love summer, even the hot humid days.  Today I want to share one of the projects I made during a weekend of workshops with Seth Apter.  My daughter and I always try to fit in all of Seth's workshops at our local paper arts store, The Queen's Ink.  We learn so much and have such a great time.  Seth is a great teacher and he's fun to be around.  The workshops this time around were on Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday.  What I'm going to share today is the Friday night class. 

The class was on using the Majestic Medallions line of products that Spellbinders has come out with.  Seth is a Spellbinders Blog Team member and he has taken the Majestic Medallions and used them in his own style, layering them with other metal components and paper, then putting them on paper or other substrates.  In the class we worked on two 6x6 projects and had another medallion to take home. 
Here are what mine look like.

 

the one I finished in class.

 

the second one that I finished at home.

 

 

 We started by creating the background on the first substrate.  Seth creates fabulous backgrounds and he shares his techniques in his classes.  On this project we started with layers of paint.  We then moved on to sprays and dry brushing Silks and other paint mediums.  One option that Seth demonstrated was to take an old credit card and run it over the background in various directions to achieve a cross-hatch texture.  You can see the marks it makes in the first photo.  Once we were satisfied with the background we started to build up layers for the medallion.  Seth had provided a lot of hardware like washers and such and also several Spellbinder dies along with a lot of paper for us to use.  Here is a detail of the first project.

 

 

 

 

 

I used  several metal components including a washer and a large bottle cap.  After gluing them all together I topped it with a resin flower.  Some of the components, including the medallion, I rubbed with Gilders' Paste for some added patina. 

 

 



The second medallion I started in class but finished at home.  I had patinated it with some green paste wax and decided on the components I was going to use.  I hadn't done anything with the mat board that we were going to use for the base.   It was black mat board and when I got home I decided to use some different green and copper sprays rather than paint it.  I  wanted the blackness to show a little.  I used some new sprays that I just got from Joggles.  They are from Lindy's Stamp Gang, which was a new company to me.  They are fabulous sprays because they have a matte base with a mica glimmer.  I used a green and a copper and built up layers.  I also used some Glimmer Mist in lime green and copper.  In the Saturday class we had used some fiber paste and Seth had suggested that if we had a small plastic bag we could spread some on the bag and let it dry.  So, I did that and when it's dry you can just peel it off!  I decided to color that with the sprays and use it for the first layer of my medallion.  I really like the texture it brings to the whole piece.  Here is a detail.

 

 

 

 

 

You can see the great texture you get from the fiber paste background.  I used some lime green paste wax to highlight some of the high points.  On this medallion I used some filigree pieces I had in my stash and also a metal flower as a top layer.  I want to use these two pieces together so I wanted them to coordinate.  By using copper on both of them, and then the different flowers as the final layer, I was able to have coordinating squares which I will frame when I find the right frames.

 

 

This class made me look at the Spellbinders Majestic Medallions in a new light.  Layering them opened up a lot of new possibilities for using them. 

 

 

Thank you for joining me today.  I hope those of you in the States have a wonderful 4th of July celebration.  We'll be having hamburgers and hot dogs with our family and friends in our back garden.  It has become a tradition we all look forward to!  So I hope you can make some memories and some art this long weekend!