Mostly Monochrome

My DT card for Sweet Pea Stamps this week is what I've ended up calling "mostly monochrome" - i.e. black and white with one other colour. :lol:

 

My starting point for this card was one of Ching Chou Kuik's gorgeous digi stamps - this one is called Restless Thoughts:

 

 

I started by colouring her hair black and from there I was taken with the idea of giving her a white dress.. and that lead to the whole monochrome thing, with just the red of the toadstools adding a splash of colour.

 

I also had the idea with this stamp of, instead of colouring in the background, cutting it out and layering it over a patterned background. I chose to use some gorgeous monochrome Floral Fantasy

digi paper from Crafts and Me:

 

 

To add an extra touch of detail to this image, I wanted to give her shimmery wings. To achieve this effect, I printed the digi image a second time on scrap paper (making sure I printed it the same size as the image I had coloured in) and carefully cut out the wings from the scrap paper image, making a mask which I could then lay over the coloured image, lining up the edges carefully, leaving just the wing areas exposed. I then pressed a Versamark ink pad over the exposed wing areas, lifted up the mask, and covered the inked wing areas with a fine holographic embossing powder. After tipping off the excess powder (and carefully using a soft brush to clear away any stray specks of powder from other parts of the image), I heated with a heat gun to melt/set the powder:

 

 

I kept the rest of the card simple and monochrome to match with the image. I used a black card blank and embossed a panel of black card using an embossing folder. I then swiped Versamark ink over the raised areas of the embossing and brushed silver pearl Perfect Pearls over it.

 

All in all, a fairly clean and simple design but with lots of pretty little details. If that's not a complete contradiction! :lol:

 

I'm also entering this card into the following challenges:

Dilly Beans - Black and Red
City Crafter - All That Glitters
Flourishes Timeless Tuesday - Seeing Red
Paperminutes - Faces
Craft Your Passion - All That Glitters

All the leaves are brown...

...and the sky is grey...

 

Well, it certainly has been recently! Thankfully, the worst of the weather seems to have moved on now and we even had sunshine for most of today! I'd almost forgotten what it looked like! :lol:

 

Appropriately enough, the theme of this week's challenge at the Dilly Beans Designers and Friday Challenges blog is autumn colours and I decided to play with my Distress Inks and make a pretty autumn-coloured tag:

 

 

 

I used Distress Inks and Perfect Pearls to make the background and coloured the image with my Promarkers, adding a few highlights with a white gel pen. I stamped the sentiment (a Stampotique stamp) and some foliage (a K&Co stamp) in black Archival ink and rubbed a little Inka Gold around the edges, finishing things off with some butterflies cut from gold textured card (cut with my Stampin' Up! Beautiful Wings Embosslit - I use this die sooo much! :lol:) and some lace and wooly fibres.

 

One thing I'll say about using Perfect Pearls... much as I love the effect they give, it doesn't half make it hard to photograph the results when using a daylight lamp! :lol: Might try and take some better photos in daylight tomorrow. In the meantime, here's an attempt at a better look at the sentiment and here's what the tag looks like without the daylight lamp... the autumn colours look really nice and warm in artificial light. :)

 

 

Happy Birthday Marie-Ann

My niece turns 21 this month. Unfortunately we can't make it to the "do" as small children and evening events over 2 hours drive away are not a good combination. So we're heading down to the wilds of Lincolnshire this afternoon to say hello and drop off a card and gift.

 

And this is the card I've made for her:

 

 

This pretty image is an A Day for Daisies digi stamp and I coloured her with Promarkers and inked the edges with Distress Inks. I used an old book page (from The Iliad, if anyone's interested! :D) for the background and coloured it with Distress Inks and Perfect Pearls (it has a lovely shimmer in real life). I used Tim Holtz Idea-ology numbers, coloured with alcohol ink, and added a die cut flourish (from a Memory Box die) and some flowers and a stamped greeting to finish.

 

I think this came out really bright and pretty but without being too little girly. I hope. :)

 

I'm entering this card into a couple of challenges:

A Day For Daises - School supplies

Simon Says Stamp and Show - Read All About It