Tall as a tree

As lately I seem to enter the challanges within the nick of (closing)time, I decided I’d start a bit earlier on this one (actually I just continued the crafting flow). It wasn’t as easy as I though, my first three attemps failed (for this challenge) as the bister colours turned out too dark. So I started over and this is the result:

I made this card for the Chocolate Baroque Colour Challenge #16

And here is how it started.

I decided to get out my hardly used bister and have a play with it. I also got some stencils out – underwaterscene stencils as I wanted something underwater steampunk. Blue of the sea, green of underwater plants or rust, and the yellowish and purple for steampunkyness. I tried 2 methods, of which the last one is imo the best ofcourse – as then I stopped as the result was ok 😛

1.) Place the stencil on the paper, spray well with water and carefully remove the stencil. Take a bit of bister on a pallet (palet?) knife and gently shake it off. Could also use a brush but that didn’t hold enough powder for me.

As you can see, there is powder outside the wet areas, and in the wet areas there might be too much powder. Maybe I should have used a brush instead. Also, the colours don’t really flow yet – should I have used more water and risk having the water run under the stencil? I let this dry before I tried to remove the powder.

Method 2:

I think it’s clear what I did here – leave the stencil (wet as it is) in place and spread some powder over it. Ofcourse, it’s a waste to just rub the colour right off, so what do you do? Right, reverse stamp:

Now this last one is the prettiest one! But too dark colours for hte challenge imo. Or maybe not. We’ll see how I finish it.

Here are the three results and the printed colour challenge image – doesn’t really look like it matches, does it? No, I didn’t think so either. The powder on the reeds below is removed, and as you can see it can’t all be removed. Maybe I should have used my magic static away dust pillow thingy?

Oh and another note: apply the bister / brusho on a different desk then the one you’re crafting on, the stuff gets everywhere and just a tiny speck of it has to come into contact with a tiny bit of wet water (I use my water spray a lot) and there’s a smudge on your card. Even if you think you wiped it all away. Maybe it would also work to not have your workspace so cluttered as I have 😛

Again the reeds stencil, but this time with inks. I usually gather all inks and paitns in the challenge colours so I can just go ahead and create instead of wondering during creating if the colour is right.

Above: the gears stencil was laid down, then I applied some green and purple. It looked lovely. I spritzed with my home made resist spray, and made a reverse stamp of the stencil (seen in the next picture). I wanted the gears to be yellowish, so I applied the colour. The resists spray doesn’t completely block the colour, but in this case it let through too much yellow. Blergh. My idea couldn’t be realized – maybe I’ll find a new idea for it.

I was determined to get one card now. Between the “underwater” stencils is an airbubble stencil, and it gave me an idea: Acryllic paint should resist distress ink, so what if I use this as snow? Before I could do that I had to stamp the main image. And before I did that I wanted to stamp the background, the edge image. I thought the embossing would cover the background. The large tree is stamped and embossed with distress shabby shutters embossing powder – but oh noes! The background was still visible through the embossing! I really thought the embossing would be non-transparant.

Oh well, lesson learnt. Don’t be lazy, cut masks. Then again, if I had cut a mask the background trees wouldn’t be visible through the main tree either. I put down the stencil and added picket fence paint throught it with the dabbertop. I was afraid it wouldn’t be “resisting” enough so I also took a pearl white paint dabber and randomly applied that, even in the tree. I like the effect of it, like the light reflecting on the snowflakes.

I coloured the gears and applied gesso to the treeparts that should not be visible, quite visible on the picture below.

I applied distress ink on the sky, making it uneven as a sky (here) is hardly ever uniform in colour.

Next steps I didn’t take pictures.. What I did was: stamp with stazon on the bottom part of the tree, as stazon IS darker. Also, the background was way to green, it should be more of a silhouette, so I went over it with my water brush dipped in Black sooth distress ink.I shaded the tree a bit and shaded some gears witha darker green, and last I added baubles in yellow and purple. The purple paper pen obviously isn’t fit (anymore?) for pearls, and the purple one is a bit more blotchy as well. Not waiting untill the card as dry (I had used a damp towel to clean off the embossing). It does look a bit messy. But then again…

It does fit the circles of the snow much better this way. These aren’t perfectly filled either, and it gives the card a bit more quirky look. Also the gessoed part looks good, it gives a bit of extra to the tree. Sometimes mistakes aren’t all that bad if you look at them differently.

 

And now to find an envelop. As you saw I just started on approximately an A5 sized paper, and I cut it to a size that looked good. A while ago I didn’t care much for different sized cards, I made my own envelops. But that was time consuming and less fun then making cards, that is why I started making them A6 size so they fit in these C6 envelops. I like the craft colour and alternative opening, and they’re not more expensive then regular ones but they are more sturdy (only have to watch the weight of the cards more now).

Hema: 20 enveloppen in C6 formaat met zelfklevende sluiting.