It’s Stamp Giveaway Time & a Watercolor Letterpress Tutorial!

Hi folks! Another busy summer week around here, whatever happened to the lazy days of summer? Anyway, this week I will be giving away this beautiful pansy collage stamp from About Art Accents. Leave a comment and next Monday I will pick a winner. Easy as pie!

I love using my watercolor markers to stamp! You can be specific with your coloring then all you need is a damp brush to give it a painterly feel. Watch the video to see how I made this card. You can also see my homemade letterpress in action!

I know you are going to ask so the paper I used is Rives BFK, it comes in 22″x30″ sheets and most art supply shops will carry it for about $8 a sheet but it is cheaper to get it online from Cheap Joe’s Artstuff (5 sheets/$22.) The paper is smooth, thick and soft but it handles water very well so you can stamp, watercolor, and letterpress on it. I always loved the look of letterpress (although try to get  a decent photo of it!) so when I started seeing the expensive Lifestyle Crafts plates go on clearance everywhere I snagged them for about $5 a kit. I guess it was a trend that never took off for the home crafter.

Here are the homemade letterpress tutorials I mentioned:

Home Letterpress Part 1

Homemade Letterpress Part 2

You can open an embossing folder and use it with the Rives BFK to letterpress too, it is the same plastic as the plate , well near enough anyway, the plates a bit more rigid. Another cool thing about using markers to stamp is that you can get 2 impressions from one inking! In the next example I misted the stamp with water and restamped, look how much ink is still on the stamp. Get more stamping for your effort!

Here are close ups of the cards:

Be sure to leave a comment for your chance to win this beautiful stamp from About Art Accents and if you decide to shop you can use my coupon and save 10% on your regular price order: Lindsay10% Good luck and til next time happy crafting!

Grab your watercolor markers!

Hi there! I had some fun yesterday playing with some of the goodies I bought at the stamp convention over the weekend. I learned a new watercolor marker technique, have a look:

 

Wanna, see how I did it? Here is a short (really! under 5 minutes, can you believe it?!?) video to show you how:

The only thing to remember is that you need a stamp that is mostly solid. I used a paper cut bird stamp from About Art Accents. Any silhouette type stamp will work. First I colored the stamp with water based brush markers and then tapped and scribbled darker shades on top nad lastly (this is the part that blew my mind) was that you randomly tap all over the rubber with black! I hardly ever pick up a black marker but I love the look! Also I never tried it on glossy paper, it is pretty on both but see how much brighter it is on glossy:

 

The type of card I made is called a twisted easel. It can be folded flat to mail like this:

 

The inside of the card looks like this. It is a regular card (you can make them ANY size, this is 5″x7″) but you score and fold the front panel from corner to corner. You can see this better in the above video. It was a challenge at OSA this week and it was the first time I tried that too!

 

Here is a side view, it is hard to get a decent pic of a card like this tho 🙂

 

While I was in Springfield the girlfriends and I went to Micheals (we don’t have one around here!) and I grabbed a $6 bag of floral small clear disks-yes I used a coupon LOL! I stuck them to my card and colored them with a permanent marker and viola-instant sparkles!

 

One last thing, the background. I saw an awesome demo from Impression Obsession and they were layering background stamps, that is what I did, I used no pattern paper! How cool is that! I’ll share how to do that later this week as well:)

 

Now I have the boring task of groceries BUT I think I can squeeze in some more stamping before the kids get home! Til next time happy crafting!