Rusty Heart Tutorial

Hello crafters! I hope your weekend was a good one. I took two nice long walks, and we went to a playground. The boys also did some fun, colorful gel sea animals.

At the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog, we have a Rust It Up theme. I hope you will join us! And don't miss the rusty goodness created by our guest designer Claudia, with her blog Von Pappe II.

I made a tag with several fun and easy rust and patina techniques, and a mix of real metal and faux metal. The copper wire was found this weekend in a hardware store, when we were looking for something completely different. It's always fun to spot craft supplies in unexpected places.

Working on a tag, I applied embossing ink through Tim Holtz Scallop Shifter stencil. Sprinkle with Mixed Media Sea powder and emboss. Always be very careful when using a heat gun, so that you don't burn yourself. Never touch the melted powder until it has cooled down completely.

Clean the stencil, turn it over and line up, now covering the already embossed area. Repeat the process with Hammered Mixed Media powder.

Ink the tag with Black Soot to grunge it up, or skip this step if you want a lighter look. Wipe the ink off from the embossed areas.

Ink the tag again with Antique Linen Distress Ink and emboss with clear powder. Repeat once or twice. Again, be very careful not to touch the powder until it has cooled down completely.

Die cut the large Faceted Heart from kraft core paper. Fold along the score lines and sand the edges. Assemble.

Add embossing ink to the heart, working one facet at a time. Sprinkle Hammered, Sea and Mint Chip powder on top. Continue to the next facet. When you are happy with the look, add some Black Soot paint to the edges.

Age a bunch of metallic embellishments with black, turquoise and brown paint. Rub off some of the paint before it has dried completely.

I layered the heart on top of an old dictionary paper, which happened to be about music. Here you can also see the texture of the heart better, and that not all the cardstock has been embossed.

The mix of embossing powders and ink on the background makes for a resin look that is a little hard to capture on photo. Since the scallops have been embossed with more layers of powder, they stand out slightly from the background.

The wire was shaped with pliers. It could also have been distressed, but I liked the contrast created by the shiny wire. The sentiment stamp comes from Tim's Winged Things 1 set, and was stamped on leftover dictionary paper and cut out.

I die cut two butterflies with the SSS Butterfly Drift die, also from the old dictionary paper.

The key hangs from a Swivel Clasp which was attached to the tag by making a small hole and twisting the copper wire to make it look like two jump rings.

This tag has a lot of dimension, which you can see here, since the heart is pretty dimensional.

I hope you will join us this week in our Rust It Up challenge. As always, you have a chance to win a $50 gift voucher to do some fun shopping at Simon Says Stamp. You have until next Monday 8am Ohio time. 1pm UK time, 2 pm CET to join in.

Don't forget to follow Simon Says Stamp on Instagram, they post great stuff daily. 

Do you use Instagram? If so please add #sssmchallenge so we can see your entries there too.

Thank you so much for stopping by here today!  

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

Supplies:

* Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.

Watercolor Snow Scene Tutorial

Hello crafters!! Today it is pretty cold outdoors again, but there is still no snow. The boys are looking forward to having snow to play in, and I am hoping for snow to light things up. Until then, I'll have to stick to lightening things up by doing winter projects, and today I have a watercolor snow scene to share with you.

Recently, I ordered some Art Impressions watercolor stamp sets, which I hadn't used before, and they are such fun to stamp with. I love scenic stamping, and with these stamps you can easily create a very large number of different scenes. You can also use other media to color them, they don't have to be used with watercolors. I glued the page to one of the burlap pages in my Dina Wakley Media Journal, but you could also turn it into a card or frame it.

Start by trying out the scene you want to create on scrap paper. I usually do at least two scenes on scrap paper first, to see how to best place the different elements in relation to each other. Then I stamped them with Pumice Stone Distress Ink on watercolor paper. You can also use other light colored distress inks. I like that the Pumice Stone is more visible than Antique Linen, while also function as a subtle shade after the watercolors have been added. I used four stamp sets by Art Impressions: Winter Kids, Rustic Cabins, Tree Set 1, and Birds.

White emboss dots in the sky, and here and there on the background. You can also skip this step, if you want less texture. Draw a few lines with a pencil so that you know where you want hills and the horizon.

Mix up watercolour paint and then paint the sky and the snow areas. If you don't have watercolor paint, you can use Distress Ink instead.

Continue adding paint. Don't worry about perfection, but instead aim for a free look.

Paint the birds, and then add more shading. Ink the pine trees with two shades of green Distress Ink, mist with water about three times and then stamp on the page.

Stamp some branches in the front of the scene with the same technique. This step helps to frame the scene. Add more shading if needed. When the paint was completely dry, I used black pens to add details and to give the scene a pen and ink look. Lightly go over the stamped lines to bring some of them back, and add scribbles and other pen work here and there. If you want a softer watercolor look, you can skip this step.

Finally, I added some grass, dots and scribbles with a white gel pen.

The dots in the sky are meant to look like snowfall.

Here you can see the details of the black and white pen work better. Some of the Pumice Stone lines are still visible, looking almost like an initial pencil sketch. If you want more subtle lines, stamp with Antique Linen instead.

If you need to add highlights to a watercolor project, a white gel pen works very well. Aren't the stamps sweet? 

I used a sentiment from Tim's Nature's Wonder set. One of the birds ended up being a bit weird, but that is okay. They are meant to be great tit birds.

Here you can see more of the black and white scribbles and grasses. You can also paint grasses with watercolor paint and a fine brush.

I love to add little houses to scenes, and this is the home of the two children.

It is a good idea to use the same blue color for the sky and the ground - and to use that same blue color when mixing up the shades of grey. It gives a unified look to the scene.

You can vary the scene in so many ways, by placing the stamps differently, using fewer stamps, stamping on a smaller or larger paper and of course by using other colors or media.

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit my blog today!  

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

Supplies:

* Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.

Adventure Awaits

Hello friends and hello to a new year! This is my first post of 2020 and we are back from a very nice family visit. The kids had such fun playing with their cousins. I enjoyed family-time, long walks and also new discoveries about family history. My mom and I are looking into the so far relatively unknown family history on her side and it is very interesting. I will write more about that in a future post. 

It is Monday and we are kicking off the new year with a Something New theme at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog. Since it is the first Monday of a new month, the team is featuring products by a specific designer/company and this week it is Darkroom Door. You can find Darkroom Door's wonderful range of rubber stamps and stencils here. You don't have to use their products to join, but it is always fun if you do. Darkroom Door is an Australian company and we are sending many thoughts to Australia, hoping that the terrible fires will be under control as soon as possible. 

Our guest designer during January is Claudia, with her wonderful blog Von Pappe II. I hope you will stop by her blog to see what she has created for you.

I made an art journal page about new adventures awaiting around the corner during 2020. Two birds are chatting to each other in a fairy tale garden. I used the new Darkroom Door Buzzing Bees and Starry Night stamp sets, together with their adorable Garden Birds set. The latter was designed by Godelieve Tijskens, and I have used it quite a few times before.

The project was a mess, and I wanted to show you that often, even the worst failures can be fixed.

Working in my Dina Wakley  White Journal, I stamped two birds and the flower from Buzzing Bees. The page is 6 x 6 in.

If you are following the tutorial, do not do this step, since it didn't work - unless you are using a different paper. I decided to mask the small bird completely and some areas on the big bird and flower, to make it easier to quickly paint the background. When masking, you should always test that it works on the paper you are working on first. It was late at night, and I skipped this, hoping that the masking pen would work as it does on most of my watercolor papers.

I painted the background with vibrant watercolors and sprinkled coarse salt over most of the background. Leave to dry.

In the morning, when I was going to rub of the masking fluid, this happened. The masking fluid did not work on the very heavy cotton-rag paper in Dina's journal. It rubbed off the stamped image. It might have worked if I hadn't left it on overnight. You should remove masking fluid as quickly as possible, but since the paint was drying, I couldn't remove it before going to bed.

The salt technique also didn't have the expected result, most likely because of the paper, but it did give a cool texture instead.

Just to show you the difference, I made a couple of quick samples on another watercolor paper. Here you can see the cool texture of the salt. 

And another example, using more water.

Since the birds and flower were messed up, I restamped them on another watercolor paper, and added scribbles with the masking pen.

Paint the birds. These are meant to be a house sparrow and a young robin.

When the paint is dry, rub off the masking fluid, and you get white highlights. This is how it was supposed to have worked on the cotton-rag paper of the journal. This masking pen is easy to work with and so far it has worked on all papers I tried it on, except in the white journal.

I added some details with a black and a white pen to the birds and the flower.

Stamp the background with the Starry Night stamp and white paint. Immediately clean the stamp. Stamp sentiments from the Nature Walk set on a scrap piece of watercolor paper. The larger sentiment comes from the Majestic Mountains set.

The small bird is perched on top of the flower.

The flower was only glued at the base, making it look a bit dimensional.

I just love these Garden Bird stamps and there are many in the set. I also used them on this pen holder.

One of the grass stamps from Nature Walk was stamped repeatedly along the base of the page, and I added grass with both watercolor paint and a white gel pen.

I hope you will join us this week in our Something New challenge. As always, you have a chance to win a $50 gift voucher to do some fun shopping at Simon Says Stamp. You have until next Monday 8am Ohio time. 1pm UK time, 2 pm CET to join in.

Don't forget to follow Simon Says Stamp on Instagram, they post great stuff daily. 

Do you use Instagram? If so please add #sssmchallenge so we can see your entries there too.

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit my blog today!  

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

Supplies:

* Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.