International Art and Soul Challenge 111

 The challenge for this fortnight was set by my team mate Jennie, and she wants creations on the theme of 'Holidays, here or abroad'.

This card took a surprising amount of time - especially since I only had two options that occurred to me. I finally decided to use a fabulous stamp from Creative Stamping magazine and went from there.

That's where my problems started. First, I thought I'd try a watercolour version, but didn't like the result. Then I decided to colour the image with pencils, and that worked well enough. The image is of three beach huts, so I've repeated the stamp giving a partial hut each side of the original three. I added a little distress ink to both the sky and sand to even out the tone and edged with some more.

I was playing with multi-coloured backgrounds made using distress oxide ink, and this was actually the third one I did. It's not that I didn't like the others - more that they just didn't work with the image for whatever reason. Finally, I did tis one and it seemed to work for me. I edged it with Versafine Clair ink, matted the image and put the whole package on to a 5 by 7 inch card.

I do hope you can join us this time.i

International Art and Soul Challenge 110

 The challenge for this fortnight was set by my team mate CG, and it's to use a pre-coloured topper.  Now, that's not something I do very often, although as I get more in to designing and decorating my own background papers, it's becoming more frequent. I recently bought a couple of packs of Hunkydory Topper Decks, and I've used a couple here.

For both, the backgrounds started as gelli prints. The first was first generation and fairly clean, the second was a second generation print to which I added ink through a stencil. In the case of the first card, I just added some inky colour to the background to take away the whiteness. In both cases, the ink was Distress Oxide.

I do hope you can join us this time.