CC&S 146 Colours: Autumn has arrived!

Welcome to everyone visting from CAS Colours and Sketches where it's my pleasure to host again and this week I've chosen an autumnal colour palette for you.

I have a lot of close male relatives with birthdays at this time of the year (my husband, my son and my two brothers), so it's natural for my thoughts to turn to male cards for a few weeks before getting stuck into the rest of my Christmas cards. So an autumn colour palette and design suits these just perfectly.

The background is masked and inked using the bleeding art tissue technique, learnt from the fabulous Eileen Godwin's blog. She creates some amazing mixed media art and if I didn't live at the opposite end of the country, I would love to go to one of her workshops - one day maybe! I used tissue in the three challenge colours, let them run into each other and then left the card to dry completely. I didn't want to use black for my stamped leaves and sentiment so have gone for a very dark shade of brown as my neutral colour because I think it works better with the colour palette. I hope that's alright with the rest of the CC&S DT!

As I have done everything in one layer I would also like to enter my card into this week's challenge #245 at Less Is More where the one layer card theme is 'Autumn'.

Supplies Used:
Tissue: Spectra Art Tissue (from Amazon)
Stamps: Leaf Decor Stamps (Royal Langnickel), Happy Birthday (Clearly Besotted)

Thanks for dropping by this week. Please come and join in the fun and share your designs with us at CC&S. We'd love to see them!

Oh, and happy birthday Stu!
Stef x

Bleeding Art Tissue Technique Playtime!

It's half term which means I've found a bit of extra time to play! I first saw the bleeding art tissue technique on the fabulous Eileen Godwin's blog and she has since made a YouTube tutorial which explains it really well. I bought some of the tissue a few weeks ago from Amazon and when I was thinking about what to do for my first project with it I found three challenges that combined so well with the technique that I vowed I would have a go this week.

I have used some of my favourite white linen cardstock as a base for the technique. I chose pinks and blues because I really wanted to enter Lavinia Stamps Challenge #5 as Eileen is on their DT. Their theme this month is to use 'Blue, Pink or Both', together with Lavinia stamps or dies. I have used three different stamps: Sky (the musical fairy) inked with Versafine, the Spiral of Spells inked with Memento and the fairy dust from another set which has been inked with Versamark and embossed.

I also wanted to enter Happy Little Stampers Sketch Challenge for May. I only discovered Happy Little Stampers quite recently and along with it the equally fabulous Loll Thompson's blog. Loll is on the HLS DT and makes wonderful CAS cards. Their sketch features circles of colour. Hence I chose circles as my theme: the bleeding art tissue circles, the Spiral of Spells stamp, the fairy dust stamp and in the background some inking through a piece of sequin waste. I did end up turning their sketch 90 degrees as I found my finished piece looked better on my 5x7" card blank this way round.

I also really fancied entering the current Time Out Challenge #31. Their theme this fortnight is 'Grunge with the optional twist of embossing'. I make so many quite CAS cards these days that I really fancied the challenge of combining grunge with CAS and I hope the team think I have pulled it off. I was going to distress the edges and maybe add a few splatters but something said I should stop and not overdo and maybe spoil it!

I finished the artwork by embossing the fairy's wings (though this doesn't really show up on the photo). I used a mat of dark blue card and finished with a computer-generated sentiment onto a piece of blue vellum which I've then cut into a banner.

Supplies Used:

Tissue: Spectra Art Tissue (Amazon)

Stamps: Sky (fairy), Spiral of Spells, fairy dust (Lavinia Stamps)

Ink pads: Blue Lagoon (Versafine), Summer Sky & Angel Pink (Memento), Versamark

Embossing Powder: Stardust (Funstamps)

Sentiment Font: Angelic War

Snippets: White linen cardstock, Sequin waste, Powder Blue Promarker, Blue textured cardstock, Blue vellum (Papermania)

I really enjoyed taking time out to experiment with a new technique today and join in a few new challenges. Thanks so much for stopping by. I will be back tomorrow with this week's card for CAS Colours and Sketches.

Stef x