Tree of Life Triptych

A friend of mine has a cool tool that she uses to emboss paper. I love the effect, but wanted to see if I could achieve the effect without buying yet another fancy tool. I used a Tree of Life stencil that I had on hand and applied molding paste through the stencil onto a heavy watercolor paper.

Once dry, I painted it with shimmery acrylic in indigo and turquoise. The embossing effect worked, but I didn’t quite know what to do with the experiment, so it sat on my shelf for a few months.

When I got my pots of old gold and green viva décor inka gold, I rubbed it on the unfinished tree of life to see what happened. I liked the effect, but still didn’t know what else to do. So, I cut three of them to a uniform size and machine stitched them together into a triptych. The pieces were joined with a strip of wool felt.

I carefully applied molding paste through three of the Artistcellar pocket stencil inspirational words, and then when dry, enhanced the words with a white signo pen. The effect reminded me of old, tooled leather, and I added some “studs” made of brass-colored brads from the five and ten to give it an Old West look.