The One with the Colorado Craft Company May Release Blog Hop

Hello everyone.

Today there is a NEW release over at The Colorado Craft Company featuring their line of stamps illustrated by Anita Jeram. This line of stamps is a favorite of mine. I absolutely love Anita's illustrations and her loose drawing style lends itself well to loose and informal coloring which in my mind means I don't have to be perfect. Follow #antiajeram for more of her art and to see many other artists using her illustrations in their projects.

Giveaway:

I will be giving away a $25 Gift Certificate to the three C's Online Store. To enter comment on each of the blogs along the hop and one lucky winner will be chosen from each blog. A winner will be chosen on May 19th and and update to this blog post will be posted on May 20th announcing the winner. The winner will need to email me at korenwiskman@gmail.com to collect their winnings. A complete list of blog participants can be found be scrolling to the bottom of this post. UPDATE! This month's winner of the CCC GIVEAWAY is Kathy Corbeill! Congratulations Kathy! Please email me to collect your gift certificate.

To find more from Colorado Craft Company (CLICK HERE!) to visit their site and shop or to be inspired by all the wonderful projects being featured over on their blog.

As for my project, I made a slimline card using the NEW Watch This! stamp set. This set does have a coordinating die set available to purchase seperately, although I did not use them on this particular project.

Images:

For this card I started with my images. I needed to do a bit of masking which can be challenging at times, so I wanted to get that part done first. I typically like to start building my background first, but for this card I wanted to make my focal images and decide on their color palette before creating the background. I used black waterproof Ink to stamp them onto bristol smooth cardstock. To color them, I used my inktense pencils and a blender brush pen.

I stamped my images using my stamp positioner, masking the unwanted parts of the image. For instance, the image of the dog on the bottom is actually balancing a small ball on his nose. I masked off that ball before inking my stamp as to not stamp that part of the image. Instead, I replaced it with the next dog balancing himself on a much larger ball. With this stamp, I made sure to mask the "floor" area beneath the ball. The stamp has some grounding lines there and I didn't want those for this design. I used a permanent black ink pen to redraw in the linework that I had accidentally masked off. I also drew in some lines to make the ball look like a beach ball. I used the last dog balancing the bones in the exact same way. I masked my stamp below his foot and drew the lines back in, to make it look like he was balancing himself on the middle dog.

Once I had all of my dogs balancing on one another I used my scissors to fussy cut the entire image as one big element to pop up onto my background. I dislike fussy cutting.

Background:

I used the same bristol paper cut to 3x8 and ink-blended some inks to create a fun confetti splattered background.

I wanted to stick to the same color palette I used on the dogs, which was really just the colors of a typical beach ball. Each dog was assigned its own colored bandana tied around their neck so that it was all coordinated. I started with masking a small area at the bottom to be my ground. I used a bright yellow-green for this. I then masked that area to begin blending on some red behind where my images would live. I blended the red into white and then into blue. It turned out a bit more patriotic than I intended but it looked nice in the end.

I then began to spatter on the same red and blue inks while also incorporating some black and white ink splatter as well to tie in the sentiment strip I was about to add. To complete the background I added my stand three coats of shimmer spray. I sprayed sparkle, frost, and white iridescent shimmer spray on the background.

Sentiment:

I stamped the "happy birthday" sentiment from the same Watch This! stamp set using watermark ink and heat embossing it using white embossing powder.

Assembly:

To put it all together, I popped the background panel up onto a Fog gray cardstock cut to 8 1/2 by 7 and scored in the middle at 3 1/2. This is the size slimline card I prefer to create. It's perfect because I also have a 3x8 scrapbook, so having pre-cut pieces of this size is handy for me. I popped up the panel using black craft foam and tear tape adhesive. I then popped up the image using foam squares. The sentiment was given the same treatment making this card three levels of dimension. I love dimension and never shy away from maxing it out!

Blog Hop list

Colorado Craft Company- Adrienne Kennedy Debby Hughes Jennifer Kotas Kelly Griglione Bibi Cameron Angelica Conrad Daniel West Sandy Allnock Mansi Bhatia Sara Torzullo Kassi Hulet Erin Thompson Laura Volpes Donna Hitz Nichol Spohr Koren Wiskman (You are here) Marci Snee Emily Midget Amy Tsuruta

Jennifer Gross

INSTAGRAMMERS

Chris Dayton Joe Syvath Traci Jenkins

I hope that I've inspired you to create something today. Make sure to (CLICK HERE!) to visit The Colorado Craft Company website to shop and check out the rest of the NEW release by Anita Jeram.

Thank you so much for visiting my blog today? Are you a subscriber? Consider subscribing to my blog so you can be notified of any exciting crafty news and information.

Koren