Acrylic Backgrounds with Fun Stamper's Journey Acrylic Paints

Kit Swap!

I joined a Kit swap at the Paper Wishes forum this month.  If you’ve never joined one, you should.  They are a lot of fun.  Basically, each person builds two identical kits following a recipe, makes a card from one of the kits and sends the second kit to their partner.  Neither person posts pictures until both have finished making their cards.  It’s a lot of fun to see how different or similar the results are.

The kit I received had papers and die cuts from Emma’s Garden.  The really nice thing about the papers is that they’re double sided so I had six patterns to choose from (I chose all six!).

Here’s what I made with it.

 

I haven’t decided what to stamp on the inside yet, so the banner is still blank.

I cut the flowers and leaves using the 12 Flower Frenzy die set and I used Design Tool Kit #6 for the front card flap and the background on the inside.

The kit I sent to my partner included one of my photos and papers from several Personal Shopper kits.  Here’s the card I made with it.

 

Items used:

• Sparkle gold twine (Maya Rd.)
• Greeting from Card Greetings & Sentiments CD
• Tan Swirly Flowers paper
• Blue paper from February 2014 Dazzles PS Kit (you can get the paper without the printed border in the Ooh La La Artful Card kit.)
• Green paper from a Dazzles kit (I'm sure this is probably available in a paper pack, but I can't figure out which one)
• Feathers Dazzles
• Gold Jewel Border Dazzles
• Flower embellishment made with:

• Ecru card stock
• Flower Frenzy die
• Ranger Tea Dye Distress Ink
• Blue stickles

Check out the January Kit Swap at Paper Wishes to see what my partners made.

Butterflies!

I had the day off from work today so of course, that means crafty time!  For a little inspiration, I checked out the current sketch over at Just Cards.  I’ve been wanting to use more of my Paper Wishes templates, so I selected the 15 Butterflies and Dragonflies, 15 Lovely Labels and Layered Labels templates. I also threw in some smooch inks to color the butterflies.  Here’s what I came up with.

It took quite a bit of practice to figure out how to color with the inks.  The large butterfly is the first one I did.  I think I like the technique I used on the smaller butterflies better.  I’m sure you will be seeing more of those here. They are really quite fun to make!

Everything on this card except the top and bottom corners, the lacy border across the center, and the holes in the corners of the red label is hand cut.  It wasn’t all that difficult either.

Mosaic Butterfly

I love challenges, they’re great for inspiration!  This week’s challenge on the Paper Wishes forum is to make a mosaic.  Since I recently purchased the 15 Butterflies and Dragonflies template. I decided upon a mosaic butterfly. I saw a mosaic heart made from smaller hearts on Pinterest a while back, so I decided to use tiny butterfly punch outs for mine.

The flower is two of the Spellbinders Sunflower 2 die cuts stacked (one is from the card I made last Monday).  I rotated them slightly and then pulled the petals from the bottom layer up between the petals on the top layer.  You can’t see it very well, but I made the background paper with Smooch Inks using the marbling technique.

Airbrushed Lighthouse

I used one of the gift certificates I received for Christmas to buy a Copic airbrush.  One of the things I really like about it is that since it uses Copic pens, there’s really no clean-up.  I’m still learning the basics, but what fun! I have quite a collection of brass stencils, so I selected one with a lighthouse on it and here is what I created.

After I removed the stencil from the background, I decided that the overspray made a nice frame, so I added a little more color and cut about 1/4” away from the stencil border.  The yellow card I used for a background isn’t really that bright, I don’t know why it scanned that way, the rest of the colors are about right. It’s closer to the shade of the yellow on the lighthouse lamp.

This was a lot of fun to make and I’m looking forward to collecting some more colors.  Right now, all I have is blue, red, yellow and brown.  They’re fairly expensive, so I’ve been using 40% and 50% off coupons to buy them one at a time from Michaels.