February Is For Lovers: Or, When I Am King You Shall Be Queen

Hello stamplings! Today for your creative delectation I'm going to walk you through the piece I made for our Lovers event, "When I Am King." (You have two more days to enter your lovers-themed art --until midnight, February 25th--for your chance to win cool stuff! Click on the link in this paragraph and find out the deets if you haven't already entered!)

Do you guys know the children's rhyme "Lavender's blue, dilly dilly"? I took it as my inspiration as I was looking at our fab king and queen chess pieces from the Chess Set. You know how some men will promise you anything, right? LOL So here's our lovable braggart king making you his queen.

Here's how I did it.

Using permanent (waterproof) ink, stamp the awesome king and queen onto hot-press (for a smooth surface) watercolor paper. Stamp and cut masks for the figures, and place the masks over the stamped images.

Sprinkle blue, purple, and gray Nuance powders liberally about! At this point, your piece will look approximately like this:

Now go town and mist the powders with water to your heart's content. Watch the magic happen as they bloom and blend! I like to leave them a little dry in spots for texture, but you're the boss here.

I next used a checkerboard stencil to suggest a chess board, and spritzed some more color through the stencil. (Did you know that you can use the Nuance Powders to make your own sprays? Yep--just put a bit in a mister, add water, and you're good to go!)

Let dry, and stamp "king" and "queen" with the Old Typewriter Alphabet, and emboss with silver EP. I outlined the letters in black artist pen to help them stand out, which also has the advantage of giving the letters more of a funky, arty, handmade look. The other text was computer-generated and collaged on.

With the masks still in place, drizzle and splotch some white and silver acrylic paint to bring light to some of the dark areas and add a little dimension to the piece.

When dry, remove the masks, and paint the figures with pale washes of lavender, blue, and purple. Accent the figures with sparkly silver glitter gel pen to further catch the light. Edge the piece with lavender chalk ink.

You are done! Admire the fruits of your labor...and maybe go give the king a kiss for elevating you to royal status!

Another New Release from Lost Coast Designs!

It's Nan again with a fabulous full Small Skeleton that is being reminded by his skull friend that with those wonderful wings he need not walk!  How happy this made my skellie friend, hence his party hat!  I hope you have enjoyed seeing the new releases from both Lost Coast Designs and Carmen's Veranda's Stamps as much as I am enjoying playing with them!  Such fun and with the fantastic events we have been and are having, it is just that much more fun!  I hope you have entered our Steampunk Queen of Hearts Event; make sure you visit the The Lost Coast Portal to Creativity   to see our last amazing project from one of the design team today!

The Small Skeleton's helpful wings and fun party hat are from the Doll Accessories set which is full of fun things!  The Persian Skull that is helping out our pal with some advice comes from Lost Coast Designs, too, along with the Old Typewriter Alphabet set for the word "fly".  The smaller words set I picked up in Japan and it is very interestingly made.  

Please check out our monthly challenge "Lovers" HERE and of course, all of our event information and all the details of all we have going on visit The Lost Coast Portal to Creativity !

The Lost Coast Portal to Creativity 

Carmen's Veranda Stamps

Lost Coast Designs Stamps

 And

please like our Facebook page HERE( Our Fan Page)   and HERE (Carmen's Veranda Page)

Let's Dance

Good morning everyone!  I wanted to share a project I created for Skelli-Fest and give you a step-by-step on how I went about creating it.

1)  Stamp the Spiderweb background in Unicorn pigment ink onto your tag.  Emboss with either white or clear EP.  The goal is to protect the stamped image during the next step.
2)  Sprinkle on Nuance powder in Scarlet and Gray.  Spritz with water and dry.
3)  Remove EP by placing a sheet of typing paper over the tag and ironing until it's all been lifted.  Your iron needs to be hot and it may take several passes to get it all off.  I used two sheets of paper on before I got all the EP removed.
4)  Stamp Dancing Skeletons in black Versafine ink and emboss with black EP.
5)  Using the Old Typewrite Stamp Set, stamp "Let's Dance" with black Versafine ink and double emboss with black EP.
6)  Ink the edges with a black ink pad.
7)  Tie on a piece of black fiber.

You're done!  A fun, spooky tag that was a joy to create.

Well, that's it for now.  Stay tuned for more stamping fun!

Until later.....................

Marilyn