Inspired by...Tammy Tutterow

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge is "Inspired by Tammy Tutterow".  All you have to do to be entered into the $50 prize draw is to make something inspired by the many awesome projects and tutorials on her blog.  The idea is not to copy something Tammy has made, but to take one of her projects or a technique in one of her tutorials and use it as a starting point for your own unique piece of art.

When I was preparing for this week's challenge it was such a treat to spend some time browsing through Tammy's blog to look at all her amazing art.  For my inspiration I started from her tutorial  post  "Let Me Count The Ways".  Her multi-layered technique of combining paint and inks really spoke to me, so that's what I focused on when I started this piece.

I made this tag while I had a houseguest here, and you know what that means... someone to take step by step photos, enjoy! :)  You can click on the photos to see them larger if you need to.

I started by using an ink blending tool to apply white gesso to a manilla tag through a Tim Holtz layering stencil.

After drying my tag with a heat gun, I dabbed some colours of distress stains on my craft mat and spritzed lightly with water.

I rubbed my tag on the colour and dried with a heat gun.

Using a baby wipe, I lightly buffed the tag to remove some colour that had settled on the painted areas.  The paint is a good resist so it comes off easily.

Using gathered twigs distress ink I stamped some circles from the Mixed Media stamp set.

With gathered twigs and an ink blending tool I lightly distressed the edges of my tag.

I tore some pieces from the French Industrial paper stash and fixed them to my tag.

I distressed the edges of the tag with a little more gathered twigs and then used black Archival ink to stamp the Eiffel tower and the fleur-de-lys from the Paris Memoirs stamp set.

Using a water brush and Tarnished Bronze distress paint I painted over the fleur-de-lys.  Once the paint was dry I restamped the image on top of the paint (The painted mask technique that I showed you a couple of weeks back).

I stamped the figure onto paper taken from the French Industrial stash, cut them out and fixed them onto my tag.

To finish off the edges I mounted the tag onto black card and cut it out, leaving a small border.

Supplies I used included:
(I can't get the stencil I used to show in the link thingy, so you can find it here.)

InLinkz.com
Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!