But this week I did not have any goals or agendas. I just wanted to play. So, I challenged myself. Pick up a cartridge, find an image and create a card.
The first cartridge I grabbed was Pagoda. I love this cartridge! Such gorgeous images!!! And yet, I don't use it very often. My friends and family are not as in to Asian themes as I am lol
I chose one of the trees then added the sitting panda and rice bowl (which hubby swears is a "sumo diaper" lol)
I made this on a 4x5 card and added the rice bowl for a couple reasons. 1. who doesn't love rice? lol but 2. my Explore is due here any day and I want to compare how it cuts this bowl at this small size (just slightly over 1/2 an inch). The bowl has a detailed cutout design and my Expression, while able to cut it, did not do a perfect job and supposedly the Explore will.....so we shall see and compare. I will let you see what I see. :-)
The next day I pulled out Mini Monsters. I had not used this cartridge yet. It seems most people use it for Halloween but that is a long way off. I found a cute little guy that screamed 'alien' to me. The rocket is from the Just Because Cards cartridge.
But I was not all about Cricut this week....yeah, I know, I have been living on that thing for several weeks now lol
I saw a great video on Pinterest this week and had to try it out. It shows how to 'bump' your stencil. Something a stenciler tries very hard NOT to do! lol
I really like the effect, sort of giving your stenciled image a shadow. However, I was not crazy about the paint I was using. I used regular acrylics (I have hundreds of them so I am not going to go out and buy a new type of paint if I don't have to) but it dried pretty quickly making it difficult to blend the background colors. I also didn't like how it bled under the edges of the stencil because I was using a foam pad like in the video.
The fish are from Fred B Mullett... Big Pompano and Silver Salmon.
I decided to give it another try after some thought on how to alter the process and supplies to meet my expectations.
I am liking this one a bit better.
I created the background using Tim Holtz distress inks and water technique (although you can't see much of it anymore since I layered and distressed over it so much lol
My base colors were Scattered Straw and Bundled Sage. I inked the shadow layer of my stencil with Color Box chalk ink Deep Green. I then, using a stencil brush, added the top layer with a blend of a light green and some pale yellow paints. Neither by itself was giving me the color I wanted so I began dabbing back and forth between them.
The man stamp is from Tim Holtz (why can I never get a clean stamp image from this one???) as well as the text (which I spritzed with water to make it blur).
And all I can figure is it must be the circles (which look like bubbles to me) which is making me pull out another Fred B Mullett fishie.....Menpachi, which I stamped using acrylic paint instead of ink.
I then used distress inks on the edges which wipes off of the acrylic paints and makes the fish stand out.
Off to plant potatoes! Yay! Spring is finally here!!! Next comes sugar snap peas (if hubby gets busy and weeds the beds for me) Yes, sometimes having back issues is a plus lol
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