Another Day, Another Play!

Day 2 of my ongoing play with the new set of Dylusions stamps by Dyan Reavely that I got just before Christmas. No aim, no rhyme, no reason, just messing about with the same set of stamps again - I love 'em! They stamp so crisply and the designs leave so many possibilities open for testing the creative juices with a bit of fun play :)

Today though, my knee isn't hurting (hurrah! and thanks for the kind wishes yesterday!), so I can take the time to let you know exactly what I did.

I began this tag yesterday, but set it aside immediately to get on with the tag I showed here yesterday. I started out with the Lettuce Color Wash spray by Ranger. I placed my tag on my craft sheet and spritzed a line on my mat, aiming an inch or two to the left of my tag, so I got a graduated fade where the edges of the spray jet hit the tag. (I then left this tag to dry, resuming work on it today. I spritzed water on the green I'd sprayed on my mat and dabbed yesterday's tag on it, to give the jumping off point for yesterdays design).

Returning to the dried tag today, I inked the rest of the tag with Barn Door distress ink, applied with a Ranger ink blending tool. This gave me a red tag with a smudge of green down the left side.

The first thing I stamped was the row of 4 large leaves (all stamping on this tag uses a Memento Tuxedo Black ink pad, as I was going on to use Promarkers for spot colouring). I coloured them with shades of green promarker, as well as the area to the right of the leaves (giving lovely sludgey brown shades where the translucent green shows the red Distress ink below!) . I stamped them again on scrap paper and cut away the area to the left of the leaves, thereby making a mask that would cover the leaves and the area on the right edge of the tag. I placed this over the leaves and then stamped the vine of small leaves slight to the left, making it look as if they were behind the larger leaves. These small leaves were coloured with very light watery shades of green and aqua, so faint that they only altered the background red a small amount. (By the way, you CAN Promarker directly on top of dried Distress ink, it works a treat!).

The scalloped edge was then stamped on the left side of the tag and coloured with a red Promarker. Finally I stamped the column of circles and coloured them with Promarkers, directly on top of the red distress ink finishing the whole piece off with a Ranger white pen. I applied highlights with the pen and then smudged them with my fingertip before they had a chance to dry so that the highlights weren't so glaring and white.

That's about it! Funny how it takes almost as long to type the description as it did to do it! LOL I had a lot of fun anyway, and that's what it's all about, right? :) As ever, click on it if you want to see a larger view! :)