Birthday

Good morning, and I hope your Thursday has started out great! And a warm welcome to a new follower from Orlando. Lovely to see another Fla. gal join me here.

I've been experimenting lately with a brayer & some plastic wrap, so my card today is one of the results. This was my first effort using instructions from MaggieC.http://silvercrafter.blogspot.com/. I posted my 2nd effort earlier, in the palm tree card done in peach tones.

I'm labeling this as a Birthday card, because I have quite a few masculine birthdays coming up, but it could be used as a Father's Day card (or for that matter...another occasion depending on the sentiment used). I have an Elizabeth Craft die for Happy Birthday, so I could diecut the sentiment in some shade of yellow & pop over in the lower right corner. Yellow might emphasize the touch of yellow I added around in the scene.

The how-to:

- Brayered across glossy paper using a Kaleidescope blue set.
- spritzed plastic wrap, smoodged up and placed over the brayered surface. Left it alone to dry for several hours.
- stamped with a Stampscape scene - first used Memento Tuxedo Black; that is my usual go-to ink, as it seems to work quite well with most stamp projects. It didn't here though. Then I tried a Marvy black which I used when I was doing Stampscape classes some time back. That didn't work well either. Then I got out the Black Staz-on. This worked very well, but also was very wet. (Maggie had named Adirondack in her instructions, but I was just experimenting at this point, and these supplies were close to hand, I didn't have to hunt when motivation hit!). The Staz-on took quite a while to dry, as well as smudged in one place on the trees.

- stamped a cloud Stampscape several times in the sky area, turning in different positions as I stamped, thinking "stormy sky".

- sponged the corners with Marvy blue dye inks, starting with a light, nearly turquoise shade, going back with increasingly darker shades..trying to create a framework to draw the eye in.

- since the piece looked so dark, I decided to take a Q-tip and dabbed in Memento Dandelion, and smudged it around in several places for a bit of light & bright.

Just before matting, I used a white gel pen to add some highlights.

Matted on silver textured paper, then blue glitter paper onto blue textured Bazzill cardbase. It was a bit of a challenge trying to find different blues that would go together, yet still provide the contrast I wanted on this card. When I first saw the experimental piece, I wasn't sure I'd use it as anything other than learning. After studying it for a while, I decided "OK, if I do 'this', it might work on a card." Then I tried the next thing, etc. As a friend of mine says "It's ONLY paper. If you mess it up, throw it in the trash". By the time I was adding the gel pen for highlight, I quite liked this. I also hunted up my Adirondack inks, messed about and did some more brayering too. Yes, I have a long way to go in practice, but it's fun. I'll post the results soon.

So have a wonderful day. Hope it is pleasant where you might be today. Come again soon. Hugs