Kiss-stamping

Kiss-stamping... or is it stamp-kissing? ... seems to be one of those old techniques that is making a come back at the moment. After seeing an article about it in the Australian Card Making Stamping & Papercraft magazine, I have been inspired to have a play. This is a card I made using one of my trials. The flower stamp is a simple bold one and so ideal for this technique - I inked it up with Scattered Straw and Bundled Sage DIs, then stamped the flourish onto it using Vintage Photo, before stamping the flower onto cream card. I have also used Scattered Straw on the right hand side of the patterned background paper and then stamped the French text in Vintage Photo.

SDC38: black, white and a hint of colour

Here is my entry for the new Stampotique Designers Challenge to use black & white with a hint of colour. Any stamps are allowed for this one so I have used a few of my favourites, and my Black Soot Distress Ink got an airing too (I must admit I don't use this very often). I stamped three flowers using Versafine black ink onto white card and masked them, then stamped the girl's face over them (stamps by ISC). Leaving the masks in place, I then used cut n' dry foam to blend Black Soot ink around the edges of the card, creating a darker area on the right hand side. I stamped the quote (by Paperbag Studios) and a couple of flowers again in black, and finally the flourish (PaperArtsy) in Victorian Velvet DI. I used a pink Pro-Marker on the girl's lips and the centres of the flowers. The background panel was created using the familiar scrunch it up, swipe with ink and then spray with water technique - also using Black Soot.

Calligraphy Christmas Card

This is another project we worked on during the week the Knuston. It actually looks a lot more difficult to produce than it was! You only have to make one wedge shaped section which is then photocopied six times, cut out and glued together to make the star shape. This can then be photocopied and reduced as many times as you like for your cards... all you have to do is add a little colour to each one as I have here.

Calligraphy

I'm just back from a wonderful week of calligraphy at Knuston Hall residential centre in Northamptonshire. We had a real international group this time with students from Belgium, Netherlands, USA and Japan... as well as one or two from England. I think I was the 'local' as I only live about 40 miles away! Here are a couple of pieces of work I did during the week:

The first one was written in gouache, the large letters in the background (As You Like It) were written using very watery black paint using a piece of wood, and then the quote written on top using a steel nib.

The second piece was written in watercolour, with colour painted inside some of the counters of the letters (I used Derwent Inktense Blocks for this). The fish was traced with pencil and I used a narrow nib and gold size to draw in the outline, then covered with transfer gold. I've added a few spots of gold to the text as well. The 'sea' at the bottom was made using tracing paper which I painted with acrylic paints, tore and then glued to the watercolour paper.