paperCARDinal: January 2018

Monday, January 22, 2018

Today, I am sharing a scrapbook layout I created for The Crafter's Workshop earlier this month to document my son turning 11. This is not necessarily a birthday page, but just a casual selfie that captured my feelings.

I used the two 12x 12 stencils below along with some White Gesso to prep my white cardstock for using watercolor.

This is one of my favorite stencils, but I wanted to make a big impact and not cover up the design I loved so much.

I knew I wanted to use watercolors, so I added a light coat of the Gesso to the a piece of white cardstock, hoping to keep my background from buckling too much under the water.

I used VersaMark and some white embossing powder to heat emboss the stenciled borders of frames and dot to create a border to capture the watercolor with.

Using 4 or 5 colors of blue, turquoise, and purple I painted the darkest under the area I planned to place the photo and lightened up the paint out front that point.

While the paint dried, I used the two 'Distressed' circle stencils and inked the shapes onto vellum.

I layered the vellum circles under the photo combined with a few black foam phrase stickers.

The quote that kept coming to mind with this photo was this quote from Shel Silverstein in the classic book, 'The Giving Tree.'

I mounted the watercolored background to a piece of black cardstock and wrote the quote within the painted frames and stamped the date.

Thanks so much for stopping by the Blog today! I hope this inspires you to create a background for ant kind of project using your stencils!

STENCILS Used:

TCW754 – 12x 12 Doodling Template - Distressed Details

TCW745 – 12x 12 Doodling Template - Riveted

TCW9001 - White Gesso, Matte Opaque

Monday, January 8, 2018

Hello and Happy New Year to you all!!

Today, I am sharing my first project for The Crafter's Workshop for 2018!

I have been a little obsessed with my art journal these days and below is the project I created.

I was inspired by The Beatles song ‘Blackbird’ and the lyrics, which I adore. I am always inspired by song lyrics for an art journaling spread and these immediately made me think of this intricate stencil, appropriately entitled ‘Tweet.’ I also used the other two stencils and media shown below.

The Crafter’s Workshop provided me with some product to create this project. The opinions I share are solely my own.

After prepping my pages using the White Gesso, I brought out All the blues, greens, violets and black Distress Inks. Using the star and dot parts of this 12x12 stencil, I added layers of ink across the top portions of the left and right sides of the pages.

Using the star and dot parts of this 12x12 stencil, I added layers of ink across the top portions of the left and right sides of the pages.

Next, I added light blues, greys and black around the perimeter of the pages.

I went back to add another layer of ink to provide more contrast after adding the black, although it still wasn’t dark enough. I decided to go over those areas with some of the Heavy Body Acrylic paints.

After that layer dried, I used the Modeling Paste to add some of the small dots and star shapes in this ‘Galaxy’ stencil. I had intended to only use the small shapes of this stencil, but ended up using a portion of the galaxy arch shape to frame around the area I planned to write my the lyrics.