Back Again Making Cards

Took a break from cardmaking after hitting the winter blues. After a month of rain, I’ve been enjoying walking in the sunshine again, getting pumped up with Vitamin D and reorganizing my craft supplies. Thought I better get back to cardmaking, so I pulled out some supplies and some Unity stamps to makes these 2 cards. They show how rusty I am!

The first card was made following a technique posted on the Unity Show and Tell FG group. I modified it slightly by using Primary Elements pigments and water to paint the stamps, let them dry, then spritz them with water before stamping the image. The nice thing about Primary Elements is that they have a shimmer to them. I used the bike and sentiment from the 8/17 SMAK KIT, the flower and map stamp from the March 2019 LOL ki , and the background stamp from the 1/19 SMAK kit. I also used a small bicycle I picked up in a trade from an older KOTM, that I stamped around. It’s kind of a mish mash design, but I was feeling the sentiment. I used 5 brads 3 ribbons and a distressed patterned paper. Even one of the brads, has a bike on it!

The second card was made using Brea Reese Glitter inks for the background and Neenah watercolor paper. I used Lake Blue and Crimson Red, and a Pink. I started by adding droplets to my mat, spritzing with water and then drying the paper before adding the other colors. I had recently picked up a 6x6 BoBunny Butterfly Kisses pad that had paper matching the stamp from Unity’s 3/18 KOTM. I stamped the jar onto the colored paper, using grey archival ink, wondering to myself whether I could paint the jar and make it stand from the background. I pulled out my Gansai Tambi watercolor, which is more like a gouache, in that it’s more opaque than watercolor. I added more of the blue glitter ink to the sides of the jar to darken the edges, painted the inside images, used the white paint to add highlights, and added a greenish cast to the base parts of the jar and the shadow below. I also ended up using both the glitter inks and paints to deepen color around the jar to make it standout.

I wasn’t entirely pleased with the kind of hard line borders between colors in the background, so I decided to break it up using an Art Anthology stencil and white Brea Reese Texture paste. Not leaving well enough alone, I then combined white modeling paste with Primary Element Olive Vine pigment powder to add green netting using the same stencil, which ended up too dark and splotchy! So, to break it up I poured a Stampendous embossing powder (which has gold, white and pink flakes in it) over the green paste and heat set that. Now I was happy! I decided to make the butterfly in the jar stand out by adding embossing powder there as well. I used an embossing pen to do that. To add the sentiment, deciding I didn’t want to cover up the background, I had been thinking, vellum or acetate, but, instead, I happened upon some white scrap tissue paper. I stamped on it with black ink and collaged it onto the uneven background using gel medium.

To make this card, I mounted patterned paper, the die cut watercolor paper (with color coordinated Washi tape at top and bottom), fussy cut images from the patterned paper, ribbon and green crystals to a square cut card base.

Well, if nothing else, had fun trying some new techniques. Till next time, happy crafting!