Growing In Unity Day One

A whole week... wow, where to start! Never having done this before, I decided to focus my creations each day this week using different background techniques. Might as well admit it, I’m terrible at CAS cards, so I’m going with my style preferences! Seemed to be a great way to show off the many varied wonderful Unity stamps I’ve hoarded, hmmm, that is, collected.

To start, I played with a gelli mat, acrylic paints, 2 stencils and texture plate, and a color scheme stolen from a Prima Marketing collection. I mixed the paints to get the colors I wanted as I went along. My process is roll the colors out I want, add a design by laying stencil on top and rolling different color over it, and then lay the cardstock on top of the plate to pick up the design. I kept changing colors and patterns and sometimes, just rolled paint onto stencil, and then placed paper directly on that. If I wasn’t happy with the paper, I would keep adding to it. At the end, I was ecstatic over the how well they turned out and how different they all looked. I took a video of the papers I created, which by the way, ended up drying flat. I used 3 of the papers (saving the rest for later).

For the first card I decided to use the edgy Better with Friends Kit. After stamping the flowers on watercolor paper I painted them using a Daniel Smith color swatch chart I had picked up. I ended up stamping the background script using Hickory Smoke Oxide ink and added paint splatters. I picked out the edgiest background to use. I then embossed the sentiment and fussy cut it out. I backed everything with black paper, added turquoise ribbon and funky sequins.

For the second card, I decided to paint the simple bouquet from the As We Go Along Kit. Again, I used the Daniel Smith paints. After deciding on a taupe background, I added a a little metallic taupe to the blossoms and a more muted background to complement the image. I stamped the sentiment using a Memento teal ink and added a gold shadow using a pen. I finished the card with a doily, gold thread and matching sequins.

To change up the mood, I decided to take one of the brighter backgrounds and paired it with a great snarky stamp set, the Today I Am Happy Kit. I had earlier made some other acrylic backgrounds using yellows and reds (creating orange based prints). I wasn’t as pleased with this set, but, as the colors are a great complement to the blue green prints, I decided to use one of the sheets to paper piece the girl. I used pencils on the rest of her. Since, the image of the girl has bubbles surrounding her, I decided to capitalize on this feature and added a ton more using black and white Posca pens. I embossed the sentiment directly on the paper. This time to make it a bit more dramatic, I created a black frame to surround the white edging around the image and called it done.

All in all, I think I created 3 very different looks, using the same background technique. Hope you agree! Try this sometime... it is so messy but fun! See you tomorrow for Day Two!