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

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