Feather master board

Hi Ruth here with this weeks inspirational post which is a step by step. Masterboards are so useful to have around for backgrounds, inchies and in my case when I need a quick card. I know they are not a new thing but I thought I'd set myself the challenge of making one inspired by the current theme and try and stick to one main image....feathers!

I started by using a brayer to cover a piece of card with autumnal shades of translucent fresco paints. I didn't mind some white showing through.

I then assembled all my feather stamps...I found  5 in different sets. Using archival, sepia, red and rusty shades I started randomly stamping with them. I decided there had to be some contrasting images so I also used a text stamp and some circle themed stencils. I used paint through the stencils.

 I then just kept layering the images trying to cover all the board so that wherever you look you can see detail. I do this in case I want to make inchies.

It's difficult to see but I also used some gold embossing powder on some of the images.

 The finished master board may look very busy but that's the result I wanted. Just to show how it can be used, I made a couple of cards.

 I stamped a feather image on each, one in  brown archival and one white embossing enamel and because the background has feathers it echoes it rather nicely.

The background above uses a stencil and white paint mixed with some silk glaze.

This background is splattered silk glaze.

I also stamped some further images which I will use at a later date. There's still plenty of time to join in the current challenge, hopefully you'll be inspired to enter.