Sweet Pea Stamps: Hope

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Hope - Jane's View

Sweet Pea Stamps

Today is my day to showcase and image from Sweet Pea Stamps and I have chosen to work with the beautiful image 'Hope' by Rebecca Sinz which is available from the Sweet Pea Store in both rubber and digi.

I have not made any of my candles recently and now seem to be on a bing with them. I did one a couple of weeks ago, this one today and another one in the pipeline which I am trying to do a video tutorial on - that is a challenge in itself lol. Anyway, here is todays candle :)

So many folks ask how I do these candles hence the trying to make the video but in the meantime I will do my best to explain the basics. I start by using temporary adhesive spray on a piece of paper about 220gms in weight and then lay the tissue paper over the top doing my best to avoid any wrinkles. Next I trim the excess tissue paper off so it will run through my printer with no issues. To prepare my wrappers I use a template I made of the candle sizes I use regularly. I then browse through my photos to find a suitable background. For this wrapper I used two images, the sky was a photo I took in the Maldives on my 25th Wedding Anniversay - a fabulous second honeymoon lol, and for the foreground I used a beach scene taken while lying on my belly to get the rocky outcrop. Next, in Photoshop, I imported the two images and removed the sections I did not want, here it was all the see and sky from the beach photo so I was only left with the rocky outcrop which I thought would be perfect to place the digi on. Next I removed all the background from the digi so I was left with the equivalent of a .png image which I could then hand colour in line with the Terms of Use of most of the image we use these days.

I use crayons to colour my candle wrapper images as I find they work the best, this one was coloured with Faber Castelly Polychromos

And here is the image fully coloured.

Next I tried something new and tried rubber stamping a gold border, sentiment and a floral design to represent stars. The sentiment worked fin and the flower stars were not to bad but the border was a disaster.

When working with candles it is imperative to think of fire safety, I would so hate to be the cause of a fire in somebody's home from one of my candles, so I have a couple of produces which are totally safe for decorating. One is a gold dust and the other is a water based varnish. To cover up the rubbish gold border I used the gold dust and tried to get a a vibrant distressed look. This was applied with a soft sponge for the top and then I used a wide paintbrush to sweep around the upper section of the wrapper. To balance the gold out I added some more to the rocky outcrop at the bottom of the candle. Finally a quick layer of the candle water based varnish to add a shine and all done :)