Hey all! Welcome back to my blog. It's me, Brandie quarantined up in the frozen north. Wherever you are, I do hope that you are safe and healthy. I won't sugar coat it, it's pretty scary out there right now. It's not even the virus itself that is scaring me. It's the unknown factors. My children are home from school and I am home from work. It's affecting the economy and people are scared to leave their houses. And though it's 'only' a flu, it's a pretty serious one that can wreak havoc on someone immune compromised- and let's face it- whether it be a newborn niece, elderly grandfather or just a neighbor or a friend, we have someone on our list that is at a higher risk. I know it seems like over kill and I worry about the lasting effects on the world as a whole, but as a believer in Christ, all I can do is hold tight to my faith and trust God that everything will work out for our good (Romans 8:28)
I hope whatever your personal beliefs are, you are safe and take time to mentally separate from the barrage of news on social media.
As for me, I have taken a few days off of crafting, as I've been busy at work (closed, but still a lot of behind the scenes things to get done), trying my hand at homeschooling my 16, 14 and 10 year old (God help us all lol), maintaining my 19 year old's sanity as she's out of work and crafting and writing.
I have to admit, I am a bit worried about my little home based business. It's always been more of a hobby business, but I was eager to get started and really make strides this year, but it looks like God's got other plans. My husband said if nothing else, just focus on creating stock. So that's what I am planning going forward.
Now as I've said, I haven't created anything new in a few days, so these are older cards from my stock. The images are from Craftin' Desert Divas and, unfortunately, the company has closed it's doors. It did sadden me as the artistry is adorable and very versatile. I had recently found them prior to the close and imagine my nerdy excitement when I found they had different mythological characters. The images themselves are not the focus of this post, however. I tried using a few different mediums on these cards and would like to highlight those.
All images came from the same retired set, Forest Friends. I colored all the images with my Faber Castells instead of my traditional copics. I find that with copics, you can get a crisper high and low light so they seem to jump off the page and give greater dimension, but with the Faber Castells it gives a softer look, are easier to get a crisp blend and makes it look more story-book, which is what I was wanting to go for. I knew I (as always) wanted to create my own background. However, beyond the basic trees and clouds I was unsure how to do that. I wanted to create sand and sea and a rock for the mermaid. Unfortunately, being as I couldn't find any 5.5 envelopes in my area, I had to trim the bottoms off of my cards to make them A1 size. I still had the glitter frame that I wanted, but you won't be able to see much detail in the Ent and Dryad here. I had inked some 'grass' using my distress inks and then flicked a few grass strands with my copics. I then added a bit of texture paste. What I did was mix some of Ranger Texture Paste with Ranger Alcohol ink and a bit of Martha Stewart Glitter. I dabbed it over the inked areas so it had some texture and glitter to match the border. Once I trimmed the excess of the card off though, it got rid of all that work. I had already assembled the border so I couldn't trim any more sky to fit more grass, if that makes sense. I really enjoyed using my Woodgrain embossing folder from Stampin' Up and creating 'bark' to frame the image at least.
The same thing happened with the Nymph and the Satyr here on the 2nd card. I will do these again, and maybe ditch the frame and focus on the textured background. I do enjoy the coloring from the pencil crayons though. Flesh tones were a bit tricky to get right, but a little practice paid off. The flowers in the above card are from a couple of EK Success punches, and the stamped and cut flowers are from Paper Trey Ink. All sentiments are from various Gina K Designs sets.
Finally on the last card you get to see the texture paste shine. First I used my cloud stencil and instead of the typical blue, I used pinks and yellows to hopefully convey a sunrise or sunset. I die cut some Spellbinders leaves that looked a little like seaweed out of vellum I inked with the Alcohol Ink. I found shell epoxy stickers from Michaels and wanted to use those on here. Then to layout the image, I had to have the centaur positioned a bit higher than the mermaid. I first spread some texture paste tinted with a hint of blue and tried to swirl it to look like water. Being as I already stamped the images, I had to work carefully to work around them and not mess up the image. The water was fairly easy, but I wanted it to blend like soft waves on the sand, which was texture paste died with the alcohol ink and then added some golden glitter. The rock was a bit harder, I used a touch of grey so it stood out as 'rock' and tried to texture it to also look like rock. I used my stylus to mold the texture around the mermaids rear so it looked like she was sitting on it. I was okay cutting away part of the clouds, but I admit. All the cards do look like the abruptly end. Now that I've ironed out the kinks, I'll have to try again. As they say, practice makes perfect. And being home, it looks like I'll have more time to practice.
Again, for those who do come and read, I implore you to stay safe and be kind. Thanks for stopping by.
~Brandie~
I loved how the die cut houses peeked over the window. I used the retired Hearts Come Home dies from Stampin' Up and cut the few houses I wanted. I created a window from a label die I had and sandwiched a couple of acetate sheets between the top layer and base layer to create a shaker for the window. I trimmed the hearts come home stamp from the set and took off the 'Christmas' at the end of the sentiment- and it worked! I added some die cut hearts and the Hello sentiment from the Hello You set from Stampin' Up!
