Birdhouse Project

Hi, Antony here!

Here's another 2 videos that were broadcast by Hochanda in the first 2019 national

lockdown. In these videos I show you how I decorated an MDF birdhouse using

products from the Prima range. I loved how the Opal Magic Paints worked over

the casts from the moulds.

Hope you enjoy the videos!

Until next time, Happy Crafting!

Antony

Decorating an album cover using products from Prima

 

Hi Antony here!

Here's another video... well quite a few actually, showing how I decorated an

album cover as well as some of the internal pages, using products from

Prima. These videos I made were used by Hochanda to broadcast, so if I

mention about the One Day Special, or about other items on the show that's why!

Garb a cup or tea... or maybe a few. Hope you enjoy the videos!

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Decorating a Gatefold Journal/Album

 Hi Antony here!

In these 2 final videos that were broadcast on Hochanda during the first national

lockdown of 2019, I show you how I decorated this gorgeous gatefold journal/album.

I've used lots of different products from Prima, from their clay and moulds, to

Crackle Texture Paste and waxes.

At the very end of the second video I give you a great tip when you're working

with moulds that have really tiny parts to them... so be sure to stay to the end

if you've ever struggled using that type of mould.

Hope you find these 2 short video of interest!

There's one more video that you might like to see. It's the one I made

showcasing some of the samples that I made for the set of shows on

Hochanda.

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Decorating a Plaque

Hi, Antony here!

In these 2 videos below, I show you how I decorated an MDF blank using products

from Prima Marketing. They do so many amazing products that you can mix and

match. In these tutorials I've used papers from their pads, as well as making casts

from their moulds. I adore how the Crackle Texture Paste worked on this plaque.

I applied just a thin coat of it and let it dry for the fine cracks that you'll see.

If you want wider cracks, simply apply a thicker coat of the paste.

Hope you enjoy these two helpful!

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Making you own moulds using Coolmorph

  Hi Antony here!

Have you ever fancied making your own mould?

In this post I explore a use for Coolmorph plastic beads to make my own.

The moulds that you make won't be that flexible, but the results you can get

using this product are still pretty amazing!

Step 1 I was given a sample of Coolmorph some time ago, and it's been sitting

there ever since. But then I had a brain wave... dangerous I know!

Anyway I read the instructions and got cracking on my idea.

I boiled a kettle and using a glass Pyrex jug I poured the boiling water in, followed

by the Coolmorph beads. When you first put them in the beads are white in colour.

As soon as the beads turn clear within the water, you can start moulding with them.

I used a metal craft spatula to remove the melted beads, but you could use a spoon. 

Step 2 The next bit is really important. I used a non stick sheet on my worksurface

and sprayed a fine mist of water over it. With wet hand I then took the melted beads and

squeezed them all together into a ball. I then misted a rolling pin with water

and rolled the melted beads in to a sheet, about 2-3mm thick.

Step 3 I took an ornament that I got when I visited Cyprus about 20 years ago.

I sprayed that with some water too, just to make sure the melted material wouldn't

stick to that either. I then laid it on a foam mat so that it wouldn't move.

Make sure that the ornament you want to use is non pourous. If you're unsure

try using the Coolmorph on the underside of it. If the Coolmorph does stick, at

least you won't see it.

I then placed the still malleable melted sheet over the ornament and pressed it into

all the detail of the head. When doing this make sure that you fingers are wet,

otherwise the Coolmorph will stick to your fingers (however it will come off

once it's cooled down)

I cast just one side of the head, because as I mentioned earlier, the mould that

you make won't be that flexible. If I'd have covered the entire head I wouldn't

have been able to remove the plastic mould once it had hardened.

Workable time for the melted sheets depends on how much it has cooled. If you

feel that the plastic sheet is hardening too quickly, simply use a heat tool to slightly

melt it again. 

Step 4 Wait until the Coolmorph has cooled down, which should take less than

15 minutes. You could also put it under a cold tap too.

Then I carefully removed the formed plastic. I now had a mould!

Step 5 I dusted out my mould with cornflower and then using FMM Bright & Light

paper air drying clay, I pushed it into the mould. As you can see from the photo, I

made sure that some of the clay hung over the edge of the mould.

This over hanging clay, gave me somewhere to hold on to and helped me

remove the clay from the mould. If you wish, you could also leave the clay

in the mould to set. This could take a while, depending how thick the clay is.

Step 6 With the clay cast out of the mould, I then cleaned up some

of the edges and reshaped the back of the head, until I was happy with

the shape. If there are any other marks in the clay, now is the time to

smooth them out while the clay is still wet. I used a damp paint brush

to gently go over a few areas on the face and used my fingers to tuck

the clay in round the outer edges to neaten it up too.

Step 7 Leave your clay piece to dry before painting it and using it

within your project.

Coolmorph could also me used to cast a texture on a flat surface, which

you could then use like a stamp and press that texture into clay.

I'm sure you'll have fun creating moulds... just remember the limitation

I've mentioned and you should be alright.

Oh... almost forgot to mention this, but if you know that you're never

going to use the mould that you've made with the Coolmorph, you can

melt it down and use it again... How cool is that!

Hope you found this post helpful.

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Crackle Texture Paste from Prima

 Hi Antony here!

In this video I take a look at Crackle Texture Paste from Prima. This is only

one of very few crackle pastes/paints out there which is applied in just one

coat. It comes in a few colours and it great for adding that aged look to your

projects. The different colours can also be mixed together before applying them.

Hope you find this short video helpful!

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

All About FMM Claycraft Clays

  Hi Antony here!

Here's a quick video I made for FMM Claycraft explaining the difference between

their two amazing clays. The Bright and Light, paper air drying clay and the

Soft then Strong polymer air drying clay.

If you're interested in getting either of these clays please head over to their website

FMM Claycraft (formerly FMM Funcraft)

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Lisianthus Flower Canvas

 Hi Antony here!

Well 2020 is behind us all now, but uncertain times are still with us. I hope you're

keeping safe and are able to find time to craft. For this post I've created a wall

canvas using some cutters from FMM Claycraft (formerly FMM Funcraft)

The cutter I've used in this project is the lisianthus. I'll be honest I'd never

heard of this type of flower before, so I had to do a bit of research to see what

colours it came in. In saying that the great thing with making your own flowers

in clay, is that you can create them to match your project.

All the flowers have been made with FMM Bright and Light clay. This clay

is a light weight, paper air drying clay. It's great for all types of projects, from

cards, to canvases and even home decor projects.

I've also used rice paper that i've stamped using a Prima Marketing stamp, as

well as some stencils from Viva Decor.

I hope you enjoy the tutorial and are able to join me for a live show on

Hochanda TV on 16th of February at 9am.

Hochanda is available on:-

Sky channel 673

Freesat channel 817

Freeview channel 85

as well as on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, ROKU and online

For all of the cutters, clay and tools i've used please head over to the

FMM Claycraft website.

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Memory Box

Hi Antony here!

For these two video, I show you how I decorated a memory box using some

beautiful products from Prima.

As well as papers, I also used some of their gorgeous moulds too!

Hope you enjoy the tutorials!

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

The Equinox

  Hi Antony here!

Today's project is a follow on from another canvas of mine,

"Celestial Love" Once again I've written a short verse to go along with

it and a little music video too. Before I get into the crafting part of this post,

here's both the verse and video for the canvas, "The Equinox"

The Moon had written his love for the Sun

using the brightest stars in the midnight sky.

As the cogs of time turned and night became

day, the union of love between the Sun

and the Moon got ever closer.

Mother Nature peered out to gaze upon them

both, as they met in the warm morning sky.

She smiled as she slowly rose into the sky and

encircled them both with her mighty majestic wings.

“I will call this union of your love, The Equinox”

she said“ Love each other equally and you'll

blossom forever”

And so until the end of time, the Sun and

the Moon loved one another.

©2021 Antony James Minnis

Ok... now to a bit of crafting!

As I mentioned this canvas was a follow on from my previous one, so

I've mainly used the same techniques to achieve a similar look.

The main difference is the textured background.

Step 1 Using an old shirt, I ripped it into strips of about 10cm wide. Next came

the slightly messy bit! I filled a small plastic bowl with a product from Prima

called Sculpture Medium. It's a fabric hardening medium that is similar to

Powertex. However unlike projects coated with Powertex, the finished item

isn't weather proof.

Step 2 I massaged the Sculpture medium into the material until is was

thoroughly soaked. I left it soaking whilst I took a 6mm sheet of MDF and

stuck some hessian pieces on. I used the Sculpture Medium as a glue to

stick these on and paint over them.

Taking the soaked pieces of material, I then placed them onto the canvas,

making sure they had plenty of folds in. The Sculpture Medium on the

soak material was enough to stick this to the MDF sheet too.

Step 3 Using art balls of various sizes, I mixed them together with the

Sculpture Medium paint, into a gritty paste. Using an old paint brush I then

scooped up the paste and applied it to areas of the canvas. I then left the

canvas to dry overnight before painting over everything once more with the

Sculpture Medium paint. Once again I left this overnight to dry, but you

can force dry it with a craft heat tool if you wish.

Step 4 Once dry I painted over the entire surface with some black acrylic

paint. Once that was dry I then started to dry brush on a magenta acrylic

paint, followed by a turquoise coloured acrylic paint.

I went over both colours with a second coat to make sure the colours

could be seen on the black. Next, using a copper coloured gilding wax,

I went over the highpoints on the textured areas to help them stand

out more. Finally I used Starlight paints from Imagination

Crafts, to dry brush on to selected areas to add a bit of sparkle.

Step 5 Once the background was dry, I started to add the 3D embellishments

that i'd made using clay from FMM and moulds from Prima. If you want

to find out the process for colouring them, please take a look at my other

canvas "Celestial Love" and Step 2 in it.

 The only difference with the embellishments in this canvas, is that after

applying the 3 colours of gilding paint, I then dry brushed on some turquoise

coloured acrylic paint to help give it a sort of verdigris/aged look. 

Hope you enjoyed this blog post.

Until next time, Happy Crafting!

Antony

Decorating a Glass Jar using products from Prima

Hi, Antony here!

I've got more videos to share, this time it's all about decorating a glass jar.

I've used 3D Gloss Gel from Prima to give the glass that frosted look and

then added some extra detail using casts from moulds.

Once again the videos i've made here were used to broadcast some shows

for Hochanda, so you may hear me mention about other products that were

on the show too.

Hope you enjoy these two videos!

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Lockdown Project

Hi Antony here!

I hope everyone is keeping safe in these uncertain times. Stress levels for many

of us are at an all time high and for some boredom has set in... but wait, there is hope

...Crafting! During all these lockdowns, lots of people have discovered crafting for

the very first time. With lots of new Facebook groups popping up, there is plenty of

inspiration out there and these new crafters are finding how calming and fun crafting

can be... and now they're hooked! For those of us who already craft, we've had a

chance of trying different styles to our normal crafting, or even different types of crafts

that we've never tried before. For quite a few people they've also taken the plunge and

started to do Crafting Facebook Lives and sharing their ideas.

This post is about one of my lockdown projects, which is a very different

style for me. I was inspired a bit by Finnabair, but wanted to add my own twist too!

I don't usually name my canvases, but this one I've called

"The Angel of Hope"

Step 1 To start off with I cut myself some MDF, which was left over from my garage

craft room conversion. This formed the canvas. I painted this with white gesso.

Step 2 Once the gesso was dry I glued a pre-printed rice paper design on top. Then

I watered down some white acrylic paint and splattered it over the rice paper to give

it a distressed look. This using a stencil and some Prima texture paste I added some

extra detail. 

Step 3 I mixed a colour similar to the pre-printed rice paper design and went round

the outer edge of the canvas to form a sort of border.

Step 4 Using a clock face die, I cut out 2 clock faces on 1mm card and then

stuck them both together to create the main background embellishment.

I painted this white and added some texture to it using quick drying Polyfilla.

Step 5 For all of the other 3D embellishments I used a selection of Prima Marketing

moulds. Usually I'd have used air drying clay, but this time round I used some quick

setting resin. When all the casts were dry, I painted them with white gesso.

The only ones I didn't paint were the two wings that I would later place on top

of the angel.

I used 2mm card to cut out a circle that would be large enough to later glue the

angel on. Again I used Polyfilla to add some texture. I also cut some 2mm

card into strips and applied a bit of texture to them too.

Step 6 For the wings that are on top of the angel, I heated the resin casts, so that I

could slightly bend them, to give them some shape. When you use this technique

make sure you don't apply too much pressure to the casts, as you might leave

a few fingerprints. Once the casts had cooled down, I painted them with white

gesso. Once dry I painted the angel and the wings with Prima, gold coloured

metallic paint. I then used a slightly darker paint to dry brush on, which helped

bring out some of the casts amazing detail. Finally using some magenta

gilding wax I lightly went over the angel and wings, to help give them a sort

of vintage/aged look and also to add a bit of warmth to their overall colouring.

Step 7 For all the other resin casts, I painted them with various colours of

metallic paints and waxes. For the floral elements I picked out the colours

of both the flowers and the leaves. Once all the paint had dried, I them

used the same colour gold as I had used on the angel to lightly dry brush over

them. This helped tie everything together a little more.

Step 8 The final part was to position everything. Firstly I decided where I wanted

the angel to go and then positioned the clock. I then played round with positioning

the other casts until I was happy. When everything was in a good position, I

took a photo of it, before removing everything. Using 3D Gloss Gel medium,

I glued everything back in to position, using the photo I'd taken as reference. To fill

in gaps and to add more texture to my canvas, I used various size art balls along

with gel medium. Once dry I painted over these with white gesso and then

dry brushed with other colours to bring the whole canvas together.

Hope you've enjoyed this post, thanks for reading!

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony 

Opal Magic Paints from Prima

Hi Antony here!

Here's another video from my lockdown One Day Special for Prima on Hochanda.

This one is all about Opal Magic Paints. These paints are very clever, as depending

what colour surface you paint them on, they come out differently. In a later video

I show you them in action within a project, but this video just shows you the basics.

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Antony

Prima Clay and Moulds

  Hi Antony here!

I'm sure you can remember last year when we had the first nation lockdown.

At the time Hochanda asked all demonstrators to video the demo from home

and send them in to then be broadcast.

At the time I had a Prima One Day Special set of shows. I made quite a few

videos, so I thought I'd upload them all onto the blog. They might come in

handy for someone, one day.

My first video is an introduction into using Prima Modelling clay with their

moulds. However the same method applies if you're using other types of clay too.

I'll be uploading more of the video over the next few days.

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

 Antony

Sun & Moon Canvas "Celestial Love"

 Hi Antony here!

I thought I'd share another lockdown project with you, this one has a sort of

story behind it, which evolved whilst I was making it. In my previous post

I mentioned that I didn't normally name my canvases... but whilst putting all the

elements of this one together it came to clear to me that the canvas was a

love story, between the Sun and the Moon. And so I named the canvas

"Celestial Love"

The Sun felt alone in the Sky, but every night the Crescent Moon would

show his love for the Sun by laying down a carpet of stars that shone

brighter than the rest of the night sky.

However the Sun was always too late to see this act of love that played

out in the night sky. So the Crescent Moon left a key to his heart, in hope that

the Sun would find it and make his life whole. Months past until the equinox

came and finally the Sun saw what she had missed for months.

The Moon was finally whole and the Sun knew that she was no longer

alone in the sky. She now knew that although she couldn't see the love of the

Moon during the day, it was always there for her.

©2021 Antony James Minnis

As well at the short story, I also created a video too.

Ok... story over, here's how I put canvas together!

Step 1 Using Prima Marketing moulds, I made what seems to be a ton of

embellishments. For these I used FMM Claycraft air drying polymer clay called

"Soft then Strong"

I also cut out a circle using 2mm card, and added texture to it using quick drying

Polyfilla. I sank the Sun and Moon into the Polyfilla whilst it was still wet.

When dry I painted everything using various colours of Prima metallic paints.

Step 2 For all of the polymer casts, I painted them with black acrylic paint and

then used 3 colours of gilding paint from Cadence, to give them their metallic finish.

First I dry brushed on Antique Gold, then Antique Silver and finally a copper colour.

Step 3 I cut some strips of 2mm card to create some interest for the background.

With these I used Polyfilla and various size art balls to create texture on them.

Step 4 For the canvas I cut myself some 6mm MDF and painted it with white gesso.

I also used some structure paste along with some stencils to add interest to the background.

For the colouring of the background I used Liquid Acrylic paints from Prima.

I applied a small drop of the paint directly onto the canvas then water it down and

tilted the MDF canvas so that the colour run. I repeated this process with a second colour

of the Liquid Acrylic paints.

Step 5 Where I had used stencils on the background, I placed these back over

the now raised areas and used a gold gilding paint to lightly brush over. This

helped just show the stencil work a little more.

Step 6 With all the elements painted, it was time to start laying them all out. I never

use glue for this next bit, I just place things until it all balances nicely. When I was

happy I took a photo then removed all the elements. Then it was time to glue everything

into it's final position, using the photo i'd just taken as reference. I used the 3D Gloss

Gel Medium from Prima. It gives plenty of wiggle time and it's a fab strong glue for

holding all of the embellishments.

|Step 7 With all the elements in place, I then painted the stars with a metallic paint

from Imagination Crafts and added a little magenta gilding wax to a few of the

embellishments too.

Step 8 Using some Stampendous Chunky embossing enamel along with a glue, I

created a sort of border round all the 3D embellishments. This was to help soften the

colour change from the polymer clay elements metallic look and the pastel colours

of the background. It also gives the look that the metallic elements have been dropped

into a liquid metal and it's splashed out onto the background.

Hope you enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed creating this piece.

Until next time, Happy Crafting and please stay safe!

Samantha and Antony