Visible Image

Inkspirational Guest Designer – ‘Trend’

20171028_113752

Hello everyone. This is my card as Guest Designer for the new Inkspirational challenge. I was contacted a few weeks ago as my ‘Wave’ card in September won Top Pick. I was sent the cue word of ‘Trend’. Now, this took more thinking about than little, I’ll tell you. There are so many options out there, I even ‘Googled’ trend, had a look through images, and dictionaries, but just couldn’t get my head around it.

So – the other way for me to get inspired is to look through my stash. I ignore what I have on my craft table – as I kinda know what’s there already – and searched through the drawers and the shelves. I wanted some arrows to stamp, to show an upward or downward trend, but I actually don’t have many arrow stamps. I wanted a distress background, and reached for my Tim Holtz Distress Oxides, then suddenly wondered about my stencils.

I thought I remembered an arrow stencil – I was right – but the arrows were all in different directions……..you know where I’m going with this, right? I am ‘bucking’ the trend.

I started with the Tim Holtz stencil, and the Distress Oxides, and just set to it. I haven’t got a clue what colours I used, or how many layers I did. I wanted orange arrows, then decided I wanted them all different, added colours, didn’t like it, added yet more colours, reverted back to mainly orange……

I did the background after the arrows, then went back in to do the arrows afterwards. So this is how it turned out, after I drew round each arrow and it’s detail with a black gel pen, for added dimension, and – of course – splashed some water on it.

The sentiment from Visible Image is stamped onto another piece of card I used the Oxides with, and splashed, and both die cut from the stitched rectangles from Lawn Fawn.

I hope you can play along, and I would love to see what you come up with. :)

 

 

Block water colour stamping and more…

I have the cards above for one challenge, and a card further below for the Color Throwdown challenge this week, but I am blaming ‘Just Us Girls Challenge’ for all the cards above. It is totally their fault. I am not to blame! I mean – setting a challenge like this. Really! I just couldn’t stop myself once I had started……I just kept going and going and going. If you haven’t tried this technique yet – go for it.

The challenge was to make a card using block water colour stamping – you probably guessed – and a link to Jennifer McGuire for hints and tips. I was immediately hooked, and gathered my inks, and my water-colour card, my blocks, and my spritzer, and off I went. My only limitation when I started yesterday was space to dry them, and how many heavy objects I had around to stand on them for 5 minutes!

I used distress inks, distress oxides, Altenew inks………all worked very well with this technique. Loved playing.

You can also see I used a larger rectangular block, a small round scalloped block, and three smaller blocks. One or two of them I let stand, and one or two I hit once or twice so the ink sprayed out the sides…….Jennifer has lots of hints on the video……

Then I had to decide what stamps to emboss onto the respective pieces…..

The two smaller butterflies with the sentiment in them is from Finnabair ‘Dream on’, and the rest are from  Visible Image. I decided to emboss most of them in black, but tried a white embossing for one flower, and quite liked it. Black is still my favourite as I like bold sentiments and images which stand out.

Whilst I was waiting for some of the pieces to dry, I also managed to make a card for Color throwdown this week:

Their challenge this week was to use red, white, and black. I thought of Christmas, and used my Catherine Pooler background stripe stamp, with her ‘Rockin’ Red’ ink, die cut Leonie Pujol ‘Entwined Christmas Tree Baubles’ (supposed to be entwined with the Christmas tree but I liked the look of it alone), in black glitter card from Stampin Up, added the die cut word ‘joy’ from Catherine Pooler, some black sparkly thingies in the corners, and there we have it.

Phew, need a coffee and feet up now. All that crating has fair worn me out…….

Two-fer

Morning all. Today I shall be posting two cards, as I am not sure if I can post anything else during the week. I have a few days in London on business, but it is up-in-the-air how many days, and how long for. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes.

This first card is obviously monochrome, and in my favourite colours. Black is a colour, right? Whether it is for the stamping, or for the sentiment, I do like using black on my cards somewhere – unless the card is sweet and cute – then I have to resist the instinct! However, I can still stamp the outline in black, can’t I?

I used the Birch press layering dies again, cut all three layers in black, with a white base card. The sentiment is a stamp from an Altenew stamp set, cut out with the Lawn Fawn wonky rectangles die set.

This second card is using my Brushos – I bought some new colours last week – and a stamp from Visible Image. I stamped and embossed the face and whiskers and heat set with black, then used the resist technique and my Brushos. Can you believe this Brusho is the black. Only the black. No other colour added………what a true burst of colour in what is called ‘black’. How amazing is that?

I then added some green to the eyes, and went over some of the white areas in the eyes with a white gel pen to bring a little more life to them.

I shall be entering the black and white card into the following challenges:

Creatalicious challenges – favourite colour

Allsorts Challenge – use two or more dies (used 4)

I shall be entering the cat card into the following challenges:

Just Us Girls – use powdered dyes