Let fear be your compass - VLVS!

Hi all, earlier this year I made this art journal page for my first guest DT post over at VLVS! and there is a video tutorial for it too. Head on over to the blog post to see how I made it.

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day.

Celebrate the season - AALL & Create

It's halfway through december and holiday preparations are in full swing. I wanted to show that you can create a card for the holidays without needing explicit themed stamps and I am using wonderful products from AALL & Create for this project. 

It's all about color and perception.  Adding the green and red colors through the lotz of dotz #39 stencil in the background makes it festive for the season. 

The circular patterns on stamp set 120 are really fun to use on their own and I embossed them with copper, cut them out and colored them with very bright yellow gold watercolors. I enhanced the edges with a metallic wink of luna marker in copper & extra accents with a white gel pen.

I then adhered them to the card with pop up dots. Stamping the flower stem of set 123 makes them look like lovely hanging ornaments.

 

I added some accents with ranger liquid pearls and the sentiment celebrate is a die cut from Tim Holtz Alterations. 

I'm very pleased how the finished card looks. 

Products used: 

You can find the stockist list at the boutique HERE

Thanks for stopping by and wishing you a wonderful festive season. 

Art Journal: Thoughts and Dreams with AALL&CREATE

Today I am sharing a project for AALL&CREATE as part of their guest design team for the coming months. I'm super excited & honored to be part of the amazing team and to be creating with their wonderful stamps designs. You'll see weekly projects from me on the weekend and to kick it off I'm sharing an art journal page in my moleskine pocket water color sketchook. 

After a long day I like to relax with my sketchbook and watercolors. Having stamps that inspire me to color is very valuable to me because I don't need to worry about a sketch that I need to make myself & get right to the coloring.

When I saw the designs of Tracy Evans and Katy Paltridge I knew they would go well together! In this project I have stamped a female figure of set #129 in combination with the flower of #123 in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook. A few work in progress pictures: 

I am using Jane Davenport Glitz Sea  mixed with some of the Neutrals set. 

I like using stamps in different ways than designed, so I used the flower petals as Faerie wings & the stems as water waves.

I did color the  petal wings with a flower color because I love the contrast of the warm red pink with the blues and lime greens. 

It's very fun to see how the stem is quite effective as water waves! And I love the many blues in the glitz sea palette to give the body of water some color nuances. 

Looking at her serene face, I think she is enjoying the stillness in nature, lost in her thoughts and dreams. So I decided to stamp those words in the scene. 

I also used the grungy flower to create a bit more texture in the background by partially stamping it randomly over the page with lighter colored stamp pads. Some more close up shots of the finished piece. 

I have used a sakura While Gelly roll to add the highlights for finishing touches.

The stamps sets I used are the following:

123 by Tracy Evans and 129 by Katy Paltridge

Hope you liked seeing this project with watercolors & gorgeous AALL & Create stamps. Please visit their boutique to shop online or to see where you can get these stamps from their many stockists world wide. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome weekend!

Happy 300th SDC!

If you have been following the SDC blog and entering our challenges, you must have noticed the HUGE celebration that has been going on in the past weeks. The Stampotique Designer Challenge is celebrating the 300th challenge! Can you believe it, already 300 challenges?! It's amazing! And we all of the DT have made a special project to share with you and today it is my turn to show you the project I have made :) 

I have made this card with my fave stamp from Stampotique Originals (and believe me it was hard to choose the one fave because there are so many wonderful ones!) which is the Unicorn by Magda. It is such a beautiful fun and whimsical design and really feels like she can make magic happen! On this card I also emphasized the whimsy as I have her "farting hearts",  LOL! These are Daniel's hearts which I have colored and cut out individually. The many Heads on the background are all the SDC friends celebrating with us, wishing the Stampotique family a happy 300th celebration. 

By the way, a little about the technique: the background is embossed with pear violet interference and water colored over it with Purple Pazzazz Diamine Shimmertastic inks. The unicorn is water colored on a separate piece of paper using Daniel Smith and Designs by Rachel watercolors. the number 300 is stenciled in using Stencil1 stencils from his book. And lastly Terri's Alphabet is used to form the sentiment. 

So head on over to the blog and make sure to comment on all the posts to be entered in the prizes that are being given away. Make sure to stay with us until the 20th when we will draw 2 people from the comments at random for the 30.00 gift certificates!!

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Little ray of pitch black (Stampotique Originals new release)

A quickie today to show you a little card made with one of the new releases by Daniel Torrente this month over at Stampotique Originals. She is stamped on a watercolor card on which I stamped off excess ink from Kassa's flower frenzy stamps and colored her with watercolors and enhanced with colored pencil. The phrases by Terri always make me laugh and I just thought this one would go well on the card. 

Over at our Challenge blog you will find a very special post about the 300th challenge at SDC!! That is right, there have been 300SDC posts so far and there will be 2 weeks of celebrations going! Each of the DT members will have their own day on the blog to post their project and there will be prizes given away too! So head on over to the challenge blog today to find out more on how you can enter!

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

Angel Hugs (Stampotique Originals new release)

It's the first of the month so that means Stampotique Originals has new stamps up today! I'm showcasing a card made with 2 new releases, the birdie branch by Tini Lubberink and the Angels by Terri Richardson.  I've used watercolor paper and my Tombow markes for this card, added some shadows with Distress Crayons and matted onto black before adhering to the card base. The hugs sentiment is die cut from Technique Tuesday. Oh and of course to add more texture I almost always use Kate Crane's Texture cube :) 

Check out more new release stamps from the other DT members in our Facebook group. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

WIP: Texture play layer building

Today I wanted to show you a little something different, which I have done before with the poppy flowers a while back, and that is to show you how I create some textured backgrounds and layer building process with paints and other media. I've used AALL and Create stencil #18 and stamps from their latest release for this.

First I start off with a base of gesso on mixed media paper. Then applied the modeling paste through the stencil, heat dry to the touch then stamp in the paste to get the texture imprint. Once that was fully dry, I gave it another coat of gesso and when that dried I did the glazing technique with black paint to get the shadows/low light effect. You can see DeeDee Catron do that HERE for Donna Downey Art Gang.

Now to add some color: I used cosmic shimmer pixie powder for the first layer. Used different colors of greens and pewter to get a bit of an ombre effect. Looks fun so far, but the pixie powder stays too water reactive and I wanted something more permanent and brighter. So in with the paints!

So I've taken my mini foam brayer and paints in blue hues by paper artsy and finnabair blue metallic paint & Opal Magic Rose Gold and just brayered on some layers of paint. I made sure to use a combination that blends well together and added lighter and darker aria's for depth. I also brayered paint over the textured aria and it had lost some shading so I tried to bring it back with a stabilo all pencil.

So the shadow parts make the texture stand out a lot more! I then stamped around the modeling paste texture for some other texture to break up the pattern.

To finish it off I added some white and gold splatters, outlined some circles with a white gel pen and added touches of the rose gold paint over it for a bit of shimmer. And I called the background done! 

Stay tuned for the art journal page I created with this background coming up soon!

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

SDC298 - Black and White with a pop of colour

Today at Stampotique Originals DC blog is the second week of a fun challenge: a pop of color with the black and white. This is what I made. I just LOVE that poodle stamp and yeah I did a lot of masking for this! LOL! I really love how this one turned out and hope you will join our challenge this week. Stamps I used are all from Terri Richardson and I used Poodle Doodle, Ewe and the sentiment I made from various words from the Valentine's Day sentiments. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

Art Journal: Floral Queen Bee

Continuing with playing in my art journal with the new release from Stampotique Originals and this time it's Flower Frenzy designed by Kassa Hayselden. I just absolutely LOVE the flower designs she does and this is no exception! The image is embossed on watercolor paper and colored in with Jane davenport Mermaid markers. Love how the white part which is embossed resists all the color.  Bees are by Jo Capper Sandon and I've cut parts of the sentiment of Be your Own Queen to make Queen Bee. The beauty of text stamps really, is you can just rearrange stuff to your liking to form phrases you want ;)

Sharing this art journal page to the following challenges:

Art Journal Journey - Flora and Fauna

Moo Mania - Flowers 

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Animal Magic 

WWC168 Feminine - Anything goes challenge  

Everybody art - 424 - Flower 

Mix it up CB #13 - Anything goes + emboss resist  

Sunny Day Crafting# 18 - Butterflies & Other Garden Critters 

HLS - Watercolor May 2018

Thanks so much for stopping by and have an awesome day!

Art Journal: So Knotty About You (New Release Stampotique Originals)

So this post should have gone up yesterday, but things didn't work out that way... but I am here now to show an art journal page made with some NEWLY released stamps from Stampotique Originals this month. Starring on this page is Mr. And Mrs. Knotty whom are So Knotty about each other. They are designed by Arwen McCullen. Aren't they just fun?  The back is made with a brick stencil, modeling paste, black gesso and deco arts metallic luster. The figures are colored with alcohol markers. 

Go check out more of the new release project on your Facebook page from my fellow DT mates and I'll be showing some more later this week. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

SDC297 - only Purple

It's already time for a new challenge over at Stampotique Designer's challenge. And this fortnight the challenge is to use 'only purple' and I've made the above postcard for some inspiration. I did have a bit of a difficult time as purple is not exactly my color, but the PC did turn OK in the end. 

The base is a piece of gelli printed paper on which I stamped Sara with Staz-On jet black.  The acrylic paint acted as a bit of a resist in her dress so I made that a part of the design. In the background I stamped Kate's Texture Cube and France's Mash Up for some texture and added the quote from quote stamp block 2 I added some highlights with a white gel pen and  a lighter color purple in the back ground and around the quote. 

Hope you got inspired to play along with us. Add your projects to the Inlinks page or to the album in the facebook group. Do read all the rules before linking your project. 

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!