Metallic Marvels Ghosting Technique

Good Wednesday morning, everyone!

Community member Lori Bethke created a wonderful array of cards from the Retreat 2009 Metallic Marvels workshop. Member Debby H. was intrigued and asked about this workshop, which was before she joined the club, and has since become unavailable.

I wanted to share one of the many techniques taught during this Retreat Workshop. The one I will share with you today is called ghosting and involves the use of a rubber brayer, matte and glossy panels, and a variety of metallic re-inkers. On a side note, I am going to experiment with the Neon Dabbers and see what happens.  I promise to post pictures with my results.

Back to the tutorial.

Step 1. Squeeze out 2 pools of re-inker (copper and gold) onto your glossy cardstock panel. I used a metallic green cardstock from the Raku collection. Using the rubber brayer, roll the ink out onto the panel using a bouncy type motion until the entire panel is covered.

Step 2. Use a stamp, press down into the wet inks, and slide the stamp to create the ghost. Please note, you are only sliding the stamp over about an 1/8 of an inch or so. It creates a drop shadow effect, very cool!

Watercolor Blossom stamp on inked Raku Metallic Green cardstock.

Ghosting on Glossy White cardstock with Aspen leaf stamp

Ghosting on Raku Metallic Green cardstock with Aspen leaf stamp

Step 3. Use the same stamp, still wet with the ink from the ghosting technique and stamp onto white cardstock to create even more art panels.

Step 4. Trim out your art panels to use on your cards.

Bonus Technique:

Step 1. Use the wet brayer from the ghosting technique to ink up a stamp.  Stamp on cardstock panel.

Step 2. Roll the brayer, used to ink the stamp, onto another piece of cardstock.  This creates the negative impression of the stamp onto the cardstock.

Step 3. Create cards using the panels.

Black cardstock stamped panel, Random Doorways Red and Yellow cardstock and Watercolor Blossoms sentiment.

Black cardstock brayer panel, Random Doorways Yellow and Cruisin' Coral cardstock, and Big Deal sentiment.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial and maybe we will see a few of these techniques used during this week's Metallic Challenge for Assembly Line Boot Camp.

Thanks for stopping by and hope you have a great week.

Julie

Digital Mix Up: Lock and Key and More!

Happy Thursday!

There’s been a lot of chatter about ‘mixing it up’ on the CS forums lately - CS Member Norma started a thread about it  (you can read that thread HERE) and Member Liaison, Julie Heyer began one that includes a challenge (check that one out HERE)!

So I figured I’d jump on that bandwagon and mix it up with This month’s Lock & Key Digital Kit.

First up, Lock & Key and Bookshelves - these 2 kits were made for each other! I pulled a few things from each digital kit and came up with this layout:

Next, I grabbed a few pieces of Random Doorways and mixed in some Lock & Key and got this:

Finally, I combined Lock & Key with the Basic Patterns Digital Overlays and created this digital card:

And there you have it - 3 quick and easy mix ups with Lock & Key! So the next time you’re wondering what you can do to punch up a layout or card, trying mixing it up a bit - the results can be amazing!

See you next week,

-Ron

Door Hanger Accordion Album

Folks are loving the project included in the January Random Doorways Club Scrap kit. Utilizing the CS Door Hangers, Club member Cathy Gray created an accordion-style book she calls "50 Years of Doorways Lead to Home". I couldn't wait to share it with you!

First, Cathy stamped images from the Random Doorways Unmounted Rubber FontArt and the CS Unmounted Rubber sheet.

Next, she added gesso to mute the colors a bit. I love how she dedicated a section of the book to information and journaling about each address she lived at over the last 50 years.

Here Cathy created interactive doors by trimming around the image with a craft knife.

How clever using the doorway images as journaling boxes!

This is the address Cathy lived at while learning to drive.
See the cute little car charm?

Great use of the Random Doorways JR "Thickers"!

Cathy did a great job with all the little "details" that make this project so special. What a great way to document all the places she's lived...it will make a great keepsake! (Supplies used from the Club Scrap Bon Appetit, Equesterian, Bold Blooms, and Random Doorways kits.)

I hope you enjoyed this project as much as I did. For more information and pictures of the finished project, you can visit Cathy's blog, The Artful Gamut.

Creatively yours,

Karen

Lots Of Creativity In The House!

Knock, knock...

What a great place for a door-shaped mini album, on a handmade house!

This is my kind of neighborhood . . .

                          

Maybe it's a little early to be talking about the Club Stamp project since it doesn't ship until next week, but I'm excited about it today and Tricia seems to be allowing spoiler-type behavior for the moment, so I gotta run with it, right?

The details will be in the upcoming Stamp Rap and the Club Stamp Project instructions, but here are a couple of pics to open the door to creativity!

The kit will make the house, base, and two darling door-shaped mini albums. One album becomes the front door and the other is stowed away inside the house.

The other thing that always thrills me is that there will be paperless/nekkid versions of the project available! I just had to create this one with my own house number over the door.

The door to creativity is wide open with this cute unique project, and I'm gladly puttin' out the welcome mat!

Creatively yours,

Kay

Digital Doorways

Happy Thursday, faithful readers! I don't know about you, but I'm having lots of fun with this month's Random Doorways Digital kit! (But then, if you know about my obsession with love of doors, this doesn't surprise you!)

I was thinking about making some digital layouts with some of my door photos (yeah, I've got quite a few door layouts already, but most of those are paper layouts and they don't use this fantastic kit!), but I decided that I didn't want a 'typical' layout, I wanted something different, artsy even. Something that might be suitable for framing that could hang in my home somewhere.

So, I opened a new scrapbook page in Photoshop and started playing. Truthfully, my first few attempts were pretty bad - sometimes, it takes me a little while to get into a creative groove, especially when I'm experimenting with 'artsiness' as I go! But the cool thing about digital is that I never run out of supplies, so it really doesn't matter how many times I have to start! Really, this is one of my most favorite things about digital crafting!

Then, an idea popped into my head - 9 squares, like a patchwork - let's see if that would work…

I used the guidelines in Photoshop to draw horizontal and vertical lines at 4 and 8 inches. Then I opened all the Random Doorways backgrounds and added them, as 4 inch squares, to the layout, like a patchwork - I didn't use the 2 backgrounds that look like corrugated cardboard - I like them a whole lot, but they didn't really work so well with this layout, so I had to use one of the backgrounds twice (but I recolored it and rotated it the 2nd time so that it would be a bit different (another really cool benefit of digi!)

Here's what I ended up with as my 'starting' canvas:

A 9-Patch of backgrounds to start off.

Next up, I searched thorough some of my door photos and picked a few of my favorites, added them onto my layout and resized and cropped so that each one fit in a square. Here's the first one in position, so that you get the idea:

Now we add photos over each background.

Once they were all in place, I started applying layer styles to the photos - this requires a bit of experimenting, since some layer styles work better than others, depending on the patterns and colors in the parts that you're working on. But after a few minutes, I had something that I liked:

Now let's apply some layer styles; play until you're happy!

Last step, I wanted to add a title of sorts, but still keep that artsy, funky feel. I decided on the 2 different fonts for this kit, in white, on the 2 red squares - the white showed up best on them. I decided that I would rasterize the text layers (um, in non-geek-speak, that means to convert them from text to graphics so that I can do a few other things to them) and hit them with a couple of spatter brushes in eraser mode to distress the text just a wee bit.

And here's my finished layout:

Add a title and you're done!

What do you think? It's not your typical layout, and I know that it won't appeal to everyone, but it really is what I was going for, and I'm quite happy with it. In fact, my plan is to print this out and frame it!

Until next time, go and create something wonderful - and don't be afraid to experiment or try something new - you never know what you might come up with

Inspiring Random Doorways

Happy New Year! Ron here with my first post of 2013. And seeing that January's kit is Random Doorways, I just had to blog about this awesome kit and tell you a little bit about how it came to be.

Just like many other members, I've offered suggestions on kit themes over the years (and happily,  a few of those ideas have become kits - how cool is that?!?). One of my kit ideas was Last July's Sorrento. When it was time to start working on that particular kit, Tricia asked me if I'd be willing to do some research on designs, graphic styles, and quotes for Sorrento - I readily agreed, feeling very honored to help with the design of the kit. Well, when folks learned that I helped with the design (Tricia spilled the beans during some good natured pre-kit teasing last June), folks just assumed that Sorrento would include some doors, since everyone know that I LOVE doors. Well, we surprised everyone by NOT including doors in that kit!

Pretty soon it was time for the annual Club Scrap Design meeting, where all the kits are planned out for the following year - Tricia's already covered how this process works (check out her editorial in December's Bright Lights, Big City Rap for more info), so I won't go into the details here - but it's a really exciting and time consuming process (and I saw the tri-fold board for 2013 and OMG, it's going to be a stellar year!!!).

Once I knew that Random Doorways was officially on the slate for 2013 - and January's kit, no less (nothing like the pressure being on to start out the year with a bang) - I got to work. I scoured my hundreds of doorway photos looking for a handful that might help to inspire the look of this kit. Then more research to find some quotes that fit the theme and hadn't already been used (and after more than 150 kits, that's no small task!) and then a little more research to look at different graphic styles to find one that might work well with the kit's designs. Add to that lots of Skype chats with Jac and Tricia, sample pages created and reviewed and edited. And then one magical day we all look at the samples and say "Yes, that's it!" Then Jac preforms even more magic to create print sheets for CS, JR, & CST, and digital backgrounds for the Digi kit, plus 5 sheets of UM rubber and a stencil. All the while Brenda & Kay have been looking for fibers, embellishments, and goodies to go with the kit, Kay's designing amazing projects, layouts and cards, and Tricia starts thinking about ALSB instructions for CS, JR, CST, and GTG (while also creating some pretty amazing projects, layouts and cards!).

Oh, and of those doorway photos I searched through, did anything actually make it into the final kit? Well, of course! Here's a layout I made showing three photos from Santorini (Greece), Pisa (Italy), and Mdina (Malta) that are part of this very cool kit!

So you see, I may have started the inspiration process for this kit, but it really is a group effort - and really, that's how it is every month for every kit - it's a TEAM effort, because Together, Everyone Achieves More!

That's it for today, now go create something wonderful!

Happy New Year!

It's the New Year, and with it comes yet another beautiful collection from Club Scrap. The holidays always create some extra-unique shipping and production challenges, but I'm proud to say that Deb and her team have all of the kits assembled and ready to leave the warehouse first thing on Wednesday morning!

(If you want this collection, go ahead and join the club. We'll send your kit tomorrow, too!)

I took advantage of some holiday time at home to finish up the ALSB pages from Random Doorways, and it has been a terrific way to look back on some highlights from 2012. Here they are . . .

Thanksgiving at the Drakes. I love Barb's wood burning stove. It makes incredible turkey!

The Gunderson's new puppy, Bella. A year old now, she's still a beauty who adores Emily.

My former piano student, Brenda Rae, is now a professional opera singer. I attended her incredible recital of arias in February!

Summertime with dear friends. Love them like family!

My sister's surprise 50th birthday party. And I love my dad's shirt: "All Purpose Dad".

Father's Day at my dad's house. It was a perfect sunny summer afternoon.

 Spontaneous boating fun with friends. This spot is wonderfully close to our home--it takes almost no gas to get there!

OK, no fancy trips to big old cities with lots of doorways . . . just life. But I think the colors and imagery in this collection can handle just about any picture you throw its way. Enjoy! I sure did!

Make some wonderful memories in 2013!

Tricia