Watercolor Blossoms 50% Off!

Now that signs of spring are finally here, I have to revisit some of my favorite floral unmounted rubber stamps - Watercolor Blossoms!

The sentiments in this collection are the perfect companion to the floral images.

Using Gelatos with these stamps will create an added watercolor art look.

1. Mist rubber stamp with water.

2. Starting with the darkest color first, apply Gelato directly to the rubber stamp.

3. Stamp onto card a panel and allow the panel to dry. Mist the same stamp with water without adding more color and stamp once again. You can get many panels from just one coloring!

These stamps work well with many techniques. Below, Karen first stamped with India Black Ink and then filled in with watercolor pencils and a waterbrush.

The card below has an Autumn look after Karen stamped the image with Earth Ink, then masked the outside of the rectangle before applying ink with a sponge applicator.

The Watercolor Blossoms Stamps are 50% off today through Wednesday, April 2, 2014. This is our little way of celebrating that spring is finally (sort of, almost) here!

Enjoy the sale!

Kay at Club Scrap

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