birds of a feather...

...flock together! this week at shopping our stash we're playing with the smoosh technique. my favorite product for smooshing is colorburst, and my favorite thing to smoosh is fancilful birds. so much so that i taught a class doing just that last year, and then blogged a little photo tutorial to show all the steps, which you can find here. so of course when i heard this week's challenge, it didn't take me long to figure out what i wanted to do:

smoosh birds made by applying drops of clear water to strathmore watercolor paper, sprinkling them with 2-3 shades of colorburst per bird, then placing a sheet of clear acrylic on top to "smoosh" the colors, allowing them to spread and blend semi randomly. when dry, i drew in the eyes where my round label stickers had masked the paper and outlined the patches of color with squiggly lines, to look like tufts of feathers. (for a step by step photo tutorial, click the link in the paragraph below this one) other supplies: various sizes of pitt artist pens by faber castell; purple core'dinations cardstock mat; gloss black cardstock from the paper cut. adhesives: elmers gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

i made a 5x7 card so that i'd have room for three of these funky little fellas. i used various analogous shades of colorburst: lemon and fuchsia on the smallest dude; gamboge, tangerine and alizarin crimson on his taller brother; and finally wisteria, orchid and a tiny bit of peony. it's been a while since i've done this, but the method came back to me pretty quickly and even faster than that i remembered how much fun it is. especially when the colorburst has dried and you draw their eyes... there is a moment when they stop looking like random splodges of color, and start looking like, well, birds! admittedly wistful, goofy birds, who kind of walk the line between muppets and vegas showgirls, but they're still pretty hard to resist, lol. so yeah, i got on a bit of a roll and made a whole flock of smoosh bird cards, and i've listed a few sets of A2 cards in my etsy shop, just enough stuff.

OR... you could read the tutorial and make your own, then link up with us at SOS. of course, you can also use the smoosh technique in plenty of other ways, and if you check out the design team's beautiful projects, i'm sure you'll get plenty of great ideas! ♥