Meet and Make: Theresa Cifali

Today’s Meet and Make designer is Theresa Cifali. Theresa is a Mixed Media Artist and Desiger from Valhalla, NY. Her primary interests lie in the paper arts, although she incorporates many other mediums. You can check out her blog here.

Let’s say hello to Theresa!

10 Fun Facts About Theresa:

Theresa has been a member of the Designer Section of CHA since 2006.
Theresa is a complete social media butterfly! She is always looking for new and interesting platforms to connect with other business owners and artists.
Theresa sings professionally. She started doing that when she was a mere 18 years old and now has LOTS of experience!
Theresa is a complete Mac geek! She thinks Apple products totally rock!
Theresa has a paper fetish! She absolutely adores all types of papers…solids, patterned, handmade…etc.
Theresa loves the ocean and beach. She is particularly fond of Montauk, NY.
Theresa thinks Vintage keys are awesome. She has them hanging all over her studio. She even has one incorporated into her business logo.
Theresa is the mother of two very amazing girls!
Theresa is very active in her local Girl Scout community. She leads a Junior and a Cadette Troop.
Theresa loves to craft with her kids. Her youngest especially enjoys hanging out and creating at mom’s studio.

Here’s Theresa’s Project:

Making Your Own Background Paper: Using Rubber Stamps

Materials:

White or a fairly light colored piece of card stock or scrapbook paper
Permanent Ink (I like to use StazOn by Tsukineko)
Dye based ink (I like to use Tim Holtz’s Distress Inks)
Stipple brushes
An assortment of rubber stamps

Instructions:

The first thing you will want to do is take your largest images and begin to stamp those randomly onto your solid colored piece of paper. To make it interesting, stamp some of the images off the page.
**Something important to note: when using this technique, you want to make sure you are using PERMANENT ink. If you try to use dye inks to stamp your background, they will smudge when you go to colorize it later.
Start with your largest stamps. Next, stamp your medium and smaller stamps to fill in some of the white space. Again, use a random pattern and stamp some of the images so they are “hanging” off the page. Also, overlap your stamps. It looks really cool!
Add your medium, then small stamps. Next, use a filler stamp, like the checkered patterned stamp I used below, to fill in some of the wider areas of white space. Overlapping images looks really cool, so don’t be afraid of it. Once you’ve done that, it should look something like this:
The checkered image here fills in some of the white space. I think that looks pretty good, but there is still too much stark white space. To deal with that, I used this textured stamp and stamped it all over the areas where there were white gaps. This creates texture and makes the over all look much softer.
Create texture by randomly stamping this type of image over stark white areas of your paper. If you don’t have a textured stamp in your arsenal, that is just fine! You can create texture in other ways. You can “stamp” with the following:
- a stipple brush and tap the bristles onto the paper
- a crumpled piece of wax paper or even tin foil
- a piece of steel wool
- the scrubby side of a sponge
- a sea sponge (which will be right by the sea shells in your local craft store)
Once you have added the texture, your paper will look like this:
I think this is really pretty. In some circumstances I would leave it just like this, however, this paper was going to be used in a vintage style layout, so I added some color using Tim Holtz’s Distressed Inks. Using my stipple brushes (ya know I can’t help myself!), I stippled the lightest color first using a sweeping motion. Then I highlighted specific areas with the middle color. Finally, I used the darkest color just at the edges of the paper for some contrast. When I was done, it looked just like this: