Technique – ink blending

Featuring ink blending

A die for all seasons

Happy Saturday everyone!

Today I’m playing along with this week’s Color Throwdown challenge  which has a fabulous autumnal combo of orange, brown  and grey. I really liked the shade of orange in the inspiration photo and I used a blend of distress inks to get close to it!

Penny Black released ‘Making Spirits Bright’, their fabulous festive collection yesterday. There really is something for everyone in this massive collection – I am particularly delighted by all the dies. They are gorgeous! What’s more, so many of them can be used all year round. For my Color Throwdown card, I used Berry Sprig (51-719) and the branches from Nestled (51-722). The branches actually bend to the right rather than the left but I saw that Jill had used the reverse of the dies cut for a few of her cards in this release and I decided to do the same. I smoothed out the edges using a bone folder, and was very happy with the results! To complete my card, I added a sentiment from my current go-to autumnal set – Autumn is Calling (30-863).

Want to see the first card I made with Berry Sprig? Well, it’s a festive one – and here it is!

I paired this beautiful die with a sentiment from the Season to Believe set (30-868) and coloured it using a variety of watercolour paints, including my Twinkling H2Os.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Halloween Trio

Happy Friyay!

Today I’m playing along with the current theme challenge over at The Paper Players .

As soon as I saw the inspiration collage that Laurie had put together. I knew I had to go with a striking black cat image. I love this trio from and older Tim Holtz Halloween set. After creating my ink-blended background, I  stamped the image using Black Soot distress archival ink. I love how this is a true black ink and this image stamped so beautifully! The sentiment is by Clearly Besotted, stamped in two shades of Distress Oxide so that the colour was a bit close to the colour of the regular distress inks I used to create the background.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Spooktacular Day

Happy Sunday everyone!

Today I’m playing along with this week’s Freshly Made Sketches challenge.

I had lots of ideas for this sketch and was about to create an autumnal card, when I suddenly decided that I wanted to use purple! So I pivoted to a Halloween card! It gave me a chance to use the little ghosts from my brand new Open House Boo die set from Spellbinders. I have more than enough ghosts already but I couldn’t resist! I added an ink blended circle, cut with an irregular circle die by Simply Graphic. The second circle is vellum embossed with a Carabelle Studio folder and then hand cut – I wanted to match the irregular die cut! The sentiment is from a new My Favorite Things set

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Autumn Tree Triptych

Happy Friyay!

Today I’m playing along with the current sketch challenge over at The Paper Players .

I used four of my older die sets to create my take on the sketch – Leaf Canopy and Perfect Pumpkins by Memory Box and the Tree Triptych and Gourds and Pumpkins set from Poppystamps. The oldest is from 2011 and the most recent is 2016! I love how timeless these designs are! The sentiment is by Hero Arts.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

MFT Card Design Superstar Contest 2021

Hello dear friends!

I’ve toyed with entering the My Favorite Things Card Design Superstar contest over the past couple of years, but either ran out of time, or felt my card design wasn’t good enough. Mainly the latter, to be honest. But this year, I decided to give it a go! As per the challenge rules, I just used MFT products. It should come as no surprise that I chose to enter the Clean & Simple category as that is my favourite style!

I knew I wanted to use one of my newer dies sets (Houseplants), but I also wanted to use a few different colour combos! For the first plant, I stuck with traditional snake plant colours… then I got more adventurous!

I love the spotty Begonia Maculata so I used that as my inspiration for the largest plant. For the next plant, I started off thinking of a Purple Shamrock, but decided that I wanted a plant with more red tones – like a coleus.

Finally I wanted to use my favourite plant die from this set to create an image inspired by the stunning Christmas Cactus. This required a little more work… and a very old die set! I cut the stems twice and coloured them. I then cut up one of the images and adhered the stems to sit behind the other (intact) die cut, creating 12 stems to play with! I added the six leaves from the die set and then pulled out the Wildflowers Centerpieces Dienamics set. It’s not in the MFT shop anymore, but Veronica used it in this challenge in 2015. Anyway, I coloured a few flowers and adhered them to the remaining stems.

I then created an ink-blended circle with the Circle Extraordinaire stencil on my card base and adhered my plants, placing a few of them on a couple of images cut from the Cat and Plant Perches Dienamics set.

To complete my card, I used a sentiment from a set that I managed to get hold of just last week (Itty Bitty Basics), positioned on a strip cut with the Skinny Strips Dienamics.

And so that, my friends, is the story of my entry, finished an hour before the deadline… yep, I’m up very late in the UK tonight!! My craft table is a complete mess – I think I used every ink blending tool I own (and I have a few)… but the tidying up will have to wait until tomorrow (or rather later this morning)!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

PS I wasn’t too sure if I needed to share the contest graphics, but here they are just in case!