Uvalde

  (Quote: Jandy Nelson, The Sky is Everywhere)

Sweet Life

This piece was an exercise in texture using a copy of a vintage photo of my great aunt Esther (in the foreground) and a friend.

The photo was hand-tinted, mounted off-center behind tinted and embossed mulberry paper (Botanical Texture Fade), stenciled with script using texture paste (Finnabair Read My Letter) and anchored with tinted book paper and a piece of crochet. The embellishments include lots of hand and machine-stitching, dots of dimensional paint, a vintage button, satin ribbon streamers and a Remnant Rub.

I'm linking up to Simon's Add Texture challenge.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

All You're Wishing For

Still playing with my new stamp (Hero Arts Succulent Bouquet), this time on book paper filled in using another new toy--a white Kuretake ZIG Cartoonist Brush Pen.

The pen's water-based pigment ink is quick drying and water resistant and it was easy to apply color on top using pen ink and colored pencil.

I really like this pen but it's pricey, $7.50 on Amazon, refill cartridges are $5.

I fussy-cut the stamped image leaving a strip of the book paper to anchor it on a background of Memoranda paper stash scraps and the text is a ChitChat sticker.

As a side-note, it must be the effect of today's upcoming lunar eclipse, but I just had a major light-bulb moment regarding photographing my cards. I was really struggling with focus and it turns out, after reading the camera manual (duh), I was shooting too close to the object. Hopefully, you'll start to see a difference moving forward.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

Hero Arts Succulent Bouquet

 

I purchased a new stamp set and used it on hot-press watercolor paper. Ever experimenting, I used an olive green shade of Nuvo Crystal Drops to fill some of the leaf areas then couldn't help but throw down some dots around the flower edges.

I created a border with a fine-line marker and green gold Nuvo Glitter Drops. It was mounted on plaid printed paper with a black card stock foundation.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

Daylight Dreams

Sharing a greeting card today that was an experiment using a white Uniball Signo gel pen (first time using one). After stamping (Simon's Sunshine Flowers) with gray archival ink on a scrap of Tim Holtz Paper Stash (Memoranda), I filled-in the image with the pen then applied tinting over the top.

The gel pen ink isn't waterproof so I had to isolate the layer with an aerosol acrylic medium. Tinting became more challenging now that the paper lost it's absorbancy but at least the white ink didn't run.

I glazed over the image with some original, liquid Clear Rock Candy Distress Stickles (unfortunately, no longer available) and it provided a nice sheen with subtle glittering (very vintage) and also darkened the colors. The text is a Clippings Sticker.

Would I use this technique again? Yes, it's much easier to use a pen over a paint brush to fill-in detailed stamps like this one. I did use a permanent fixative for the isolation coat because I didn't have the "workable" kind so next time I'll try the later to see if there's a difference when it comes to applying color over the top.

I could just use markers, colored pencils, etc., but what I'm seeking is a nice white background when stamping on pre-printed paper so that the colors will pop.

A side note on Clear Rock Candy: I recently bought the dry form that comes in a jar that is sprinkled over any wet medium. I plan to do some experimenting but I'll be hard pressed to replicate the very liquid, easy-to-spread medium that you just squeezed out of the applicator bottle it originally came in.

Ranger doesn't make any of the liquid Distress Stickles any more but, believe it or not, I still have usable bottles that haven't dried out over the years like the non-Distress Stickles do. They came in squeeze bottles with a larger opening on the applicator tip and since I kept some of these empty bottles, well, stay tuned....

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.