Monday, January 30, 2017

My Cards and Tags: W Plus 9 "Fish More" Stamps

This week's theme at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog is "Pets Corner."  In full disclosure here, I am NOT a pet person!  I care about animals and their well-being, but every pet encounter in my youth was disastrous or traumatic (devil Chihuahuas, ornery parakeets, allergy-attack-inducing cats, etc.) and I've never quite grown out of that.  So I went with a fish-theme (ok, fish lures- it was as close as I could go) for this week's project.


I started by cutting tags out of Strathmore Mixed Media paper using Mama Elephant's Bowtiful die and Reverse Confetti's Thanks die.  I stamped them with Ranger Jet Black Archival and some images from Paper Artsy and Simon Says Stamp.  The horizontal lines are from a stamp in one of my Concord & 9th sets.


I watercolored some sections and smeared on some Distress Ink with a sponge.


Next up I glued on a die-cut circle shape from Simon Says Stamp and covered some parts of the tags with white acrylic paint.


I stamped and fussy-cut these darling fish lures from a W Plus 9 stamp set and added them on, along with the sentiment.


I finished them off with a simple bit of white embroidery floss to go through the hole at the top.


These are the supplies I used on these tags, which you can find at Simon Says Stamp:



I know that there are many pet fans out there, so I can't wait to see how you pay homage.  Be sure to upload your genius works to the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog for your chance to win a $50 voucher to the Simon Says Stamp store!


Sunday, January 29, 2017

My Cards and Tags: Using Reverse Confetti's Happy Pretty Panel

You know I love me some Reverse Confetti and Simon Says Stamp always has a great variety of their products.  I am always looking for fun new sketches to try, so I decided to give Reverse Confetti's January sketch a go.  Here's what resulted:


For this card, I used Reverse Confetti's Happy Pretty Panel, a "For You" sentiment from the Whole Lotta Love stamp set, beautiful blue patterned paper from the Fright Night collection, one of the Swirlies dies, and the circle garland die (straightened out and going vertically).  I used white paint and acrylic paints and outlined some of the circles using Simon Says Stamp's Scribble Flowers set.  The paper is all from my bottomless "stash," which is endless and hoarder-esque. The background paper is from Prima's Epiphany line, but the others are mere nameless scraps.

Hope your weekend is full of of happy things and thanks, as always, for taking the time to visit my little corner of the blogging universe.
 

Monday, January 23, 2017

My Other Creations: Girl Collage Using Impression Obsession's "She Was Tired" Stamp

I've been wanting to improve my drawing skills for quite awhile now and finally got down to practicing!  So while this is just an early sketching attempt with plenty o' errors, I wanted to be courageous in sharing my progress since this week's Simon Says Stamp theme is "Spread Your Wings."

I started by consulting some books on how to draw faces, then roughed out the basics:


Next I whipped out my watercolors and painted in some general tones.


I stenciled blue and purple onto the background using Tim Holtz's Latticework stencil, and smeared and painted streaks down to blend things together.  I added more color to the face and background with alcohol markers and chalk.


I finished it out by adding some circles stamped with flowers and one of my all-time favorite sentiment stamps from Impression Obsession.

Here are the supplies I used that you can find at Simon Says Stamp:


I am excited to see how you interpret our "Spread Your Wings" theme!  Be sure to upload your creations to the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog for your chance to win a $50 voucher to the Simon Says Stamp store!