Oh My Hat!

Here is hat 2 in a series of 3...I have decided to enter it into Sandee and Amelie's Stemapunk challenge.  The theme this month is stories and there is quite a story behind these hats that I am working on.  I am doing them as samples to see how long they take me as I have been asked to do a commission of a steampunk art installation at a local well known coffee shop.  I have to give them a quote as to how much it is all going to cost and frankly, I know how much I would like to charge...but I have to work out if that is worth all the time that goes into making things like this...so that is the story behind this hat and the one to follow.  I have already done the first one and still need to do the third one!

Get a good cup/glass of something, cos this is a photo heavy post of how I made this top hat!

 I started by painting the felt hat with gesso, when this was dry, I put a layer of gesso through this Stencil which I held in place with painters tape.

Why is it that I always land up working in a tiny space?  I did clean up the chaos after I took this photo! I needed elbow room!  Once I had let the gesso dry, I added some cogs cut from foamcore and some from cardstock, covered with sticky backed foil.

Below are the photos of the hat in its gesso stage.

 Then I added some distress paint and waited for it to dry.  I could not heatgun this as the foamcore melts...this tested my patience a tad...

 Once the base paint was dry, I set about adding various shades of brown and some metallic paints in the dark brown and copper.  The final touch was adding the shadows in black beneath each item on the hat.

I added some of Tim's idea-ology line to the front.

I used the same stencil and added some Coffee Archival ink through it so there was some continuity around the hat.

Now to decide how I am going to do the final hat in the series...maybe a bit of a girly version?