Japanese Dividing Screen Card

This is a card I made for a former student in Japan.  The card had to be fairly small in order to fit in the package I'd put together, which is why I made it into a dividing screen card.  I stamped the images on glossy cardstock (Stampscapes and a Torii stamp I carved myself), then used two shades of red, brown and black ink to shade in the image.  I left the path to the mountains lighter than the surroundings to draw the eye.

I cut a piece of black cardstock and scored it twice.  I carefully trimmed around the legs on the bottom.

When the glossy panel was dry I cut it into strips and used adhesive to attach the strips to the card base.

Forest Scene Card

I don't normally keep aside Christmas cards for myself, but this year I've made an exception.  Today's card was a strange lesson in how doing everything wrong can sometimes be right.

Let's start with the stencil.  I made it out of green acetate on my Silhouette SD.  I'd intended the silhouette to allow me to make white birch trees on a dark background.  So, first mistake: I made a stencil of the birch trees rather than a stencil of the spaces between the trees.

I managed to mostly get the delicate stencil off the sticky backing it's cut on.  I believe there was only one minor tear.

Despite getting the stencil wrong I still wanted to try it out, so I went on to step two, spraying the stencil with a repositional adhesive, so I could lay it on my paper and not worry about it moving around while I inked around it.  I was a little too impatient with this step and didn't let it sit long enough to become tacky rather than sticky and just slapped it down onto the die cut oval of glossy paper I was using (taped to my scrap paper on my craft mat so it wouldn't move either).

I started the stencilling by running a black marker over the indents in the trunks, so it would have the birch bark look.  I then took black, blue and metallic blue gelatos and preceded to smear them into the spaces between the trees, forming a night scene.  It took a fair amount of time to get this dark enough and blended enough, but I was happy with how it looked.

Then I pulled up the stencil.  Because it was more gluey than tacky it stuck to the scrap paper, ripping  the paper and the stencil.  The panel didn't tear, but the glue came off the stencil, making the front of the panel sticky.  I also noticed that the black marker ran, making the indent bits less defined than I'd intended.

Here's a photo of the stencil after removing it from the panel.

I decided the panel was probably a waste, but thought it might be worth trying the old eraser trick on it.  I was hoping the eraser would pick up the glue, allowing me to still use the panel.  Well, the eraser had two effects, the first was to smear the gelatos onto the white trees, the second was to form a grey mess with the glue.  Now, had I continued erasing I would have gotten rid of the glue in time, but the trees would have been ruined due to the smearing colour.  But I realized that the darkness where the eraser hit the glue - and the texture that formed from it - looked surprisingly like actual tree bark.

So I stopped erasing and flicked some white paint pen flecks at the panel.  I also ran a marker around the edge, so it would have a black frame.

To finish the card I used some silhouette cut holly flourishes, deer and poinsettia (the larger poinsettia was done with a die and accented with a marker).  I also took some white plastic wire and glued beads to the ends to add to the flourish.  Finally I added some gold embossing liquid to the centers of the flowers and stamped the greeting.

Green Mountain Waterfall Card

This is another stampscape card I made.  I stamped the images in black ink on glossy paper and then used a mix of yellow, green, brown, grey and black ink to colour the paper.  I mounted the image on grey cardstock with a medium green card base.  As an accent, I added two Lawn Fawn maple leaf sequins in the bottom left corner.  They overlap a bit more than I wanted but I used a glue gun to make sure they stuck on properly and couldn't adjust them afterwards.

Stampscapes

I recently bought a bunch of Stampscape stamps.  It's a company and technique using silhouette stamps with inked backgrounds.  As they're mostly all nature stamps, I figured they'd make amazing masculine cards.  I also went through the stamp sets I already own to find other silhouette images I could use (mostly for foreground elements).

Here are a few of my starter images.  The point is to do rough stamping, rather than carefully measured and arranged works.  The images are stamped on glossy paper (I got mine from Local King Rubber Stamps at a craft show a few years back).  The stampscapes site recommends against using photo glossy paper.  I'm not sure what the difference is.

Here's a finished card, with foreground, focal images and background images.  I've inked it with several shades of blue, and black around the edges, and finished it off with some white gel marker highlights.  I mounted it on dark blue cardstock with a black cardstock mat.

Austen Silhouette Congratulations Card

A close friend of mine, who has published several books through Christian and ebook presses, has just published her first Harlequin novel!  She's been trying to get published with them for ages, and I'm so proud of her.

So I sent her a card. :)

I brought out my Papertrey Ink Simply Jane (Austen) stamp set and my new Petra's large ovals die and got to work.

I die cut the oval, inking through the die and around the exposed bits, then used a darker purple for the silhouettes in the center.  I also clear embossed them, so they shimmer a bit.  The corners looked a bit bare, so I added a stamped image to flesh them out a bit.  Voila!