Tiny Tales Collection: Rainy Night

I'm so proud to announce that my friend, Carol Porter, aka @naysworld8 has designed this ah-mayyyyy-zing digital collection, which is now available in her NaysWorld Etsy Shop. Whether you're a digital, physical or hybrid papercrafter, I think you're going to love this kit and find lots of ways to use Tiny Tales Collections Presents - Rainy Night: Chapter 1 — The Walk Home (Notice it says, "Chapter 1... because it's a growing series… more stories are on the way!)

The kit features 12 gorgeous .png elements which resize beautifully and look great whether you use them in big or small digital art; AND no matter what size I printed them, they looked absolutely perfect on both plain cardstock and glossy photo paper. Case in point:

I made two physical versions of this City Walk layout design; one as an A2 card and one as a larger art journal page, about 6 x 9" including the gel print background.

I layered some of the elements before printing and added others that I printed and fussycut. For the latter, I chose to leave a very skinny white border to get maximum definition.

No matter what size I chose or what paper I used, the images were flawless, scaling perfectly and printing beautifully. I also made a pretty large all-digital collage... just because I could, lol:

As you can see, I added a background paper that wasn't in the kit and I widened the city street image just a tad to accommodate the square format, with no distortion or loss of clarity. I put a bit of a drop shadow on the lady and on the sentiment strips, but otherwise the images are exactly as they came in the kit.

I'll have more projects later this week, so stay tuned. In the meantime, make sure to check out Carol's work via Instagram @naysworld8 as well as her Nay's World Website and find the first Tiny Tales Collection in her NaysWorld Etsy Shop!

Don't Be Koi

Feeling a bit fishy this Mandala Monday, thanks to this fun vintage (octagonal!) needlework pattern I've used as a centerpiece. The petals are made from beautifully patina-ed vintage Chinese dictionary pages (thank you Liz!) and Big Dollar Trading stamps (thank you Stephanie!) while the circles are graph paper and parts of a crochet-stitch illustration. I feel like this needs one... more... thing... BUT I've been considering and trying out "one more things" for several days with no outcome. So it's possible you'll see this one again at a later date, if I ever figure out what to add, lol.

Hope your first week of Spring is off to a good(ish?) start! 

Even MORE Roses!

Spring is officially here but it'll be a little while yet until we see daffodils in our gardens, much less roses; so here are some that I painted using three of my favorite new Archival Ink shades from Ranger: Sweet Treat, Avocado Toast and Sand Castle.

I used a waterbrush full of Isopropyl Alcohol to pick up Sweet Treat ink I had smooshed onto my craft sheet, swirled it around into loose, semi-circular shapes, let it dry and then "found" the layers and petals of the roses and used Wendy Vecchi's brilliant Wonky Double Outline Trick with a Black Letter It Fineliner. For leaves, a vaguely triangular shape with the hypotenuse tucked under the flower works pretty well and a little bit of tannish Sand Castle ink mixed with the Avocado Toast adds interest and the illusion of texture. 

As with most of my watercolors (whether done with water-based or alcohol-based media) I like to use up any extra pigment by splashing it as speckles randomly on top of my design. So I did.

We Three... Ugly Sweaters (x2)

We're still celebrating THREE's at Jingle Belles; so this fortnight you can basically choose any color palette, any layout, any theme and any products; but... we want to see a strong group of THREE...something. 

I have about half a sheet left of PhotoPlay's (appropriately named) Ugly Sweater Party patterned paper, and I must confess that although I've had several of these sheets, I've never used it as a background or in any other way than as I've used it here. I really only want to cut out the cute little sweaters and put them on cards. So much so, that I had cut out four or five sweaters to make my THREE-centric card before remembering I either had to put some aside or make two cards with three sweaters. Obviously, I chose the latter course. I used my Elizabethcraft Planner Filmstrip die to hold the sweater trios and I had planned to stamp, "Don we now our ugly sweaters" as the sentiment. Because I could have sworn I had a stamp that said that. As it turns out, either I was mistaken, OR it's been hidden away by the gremlins who also steal single socks and tupperware lids. So after a bit of searching and quite a lot of grumbling, I just formatted the text on my computer and printed it out. Which doesn't mean I won't, for the next few weeks, spend a few random minutes here and there still vaguely looking for that stamp... Obviously... 

JB2606: We THREE Kings runs until next Wednesday evening, March 18th. Head over to Jingle Belles to see the Readers' Gallery and link your own tremendous trio(s)!

Chicks and Eggs and Flowers

Spring officially begins this weekend, and Easter is just around the corner; what better time for a bold and colorful card featuring Eyelet Outlet Chick Brads, Sun and Cloud Brads, Bright Fresh Flowers and Colored Daisy Brads?

The bold background is Simon Hurley's Egg Hunt Background Stamp which I embossed with Ranger White Embossing Powder, to act as a resist for a rainbow-inspired blend of Simon Hurley Stellar Inks that match the brads reallllllly well!

Egg-cellent Easter EO Shopping List:

Chick Brads

Sun and Cloud Brads

Bright Fresh Flower Brads

Colored Daisy Brads

Eyelet Outlet makes Easter cards (and all other cards, too, actually!) easy and fun!

Chic Birthday Card Set

The exclusive new line of Make-It Clear Stamps and Stencils can ONLY be found in the Ranger Store. Today's post features a set of four minicards made with the Chic Birthday Stamp Set, Sprinkle Hearts Stencil and four of the brand new Archival Ink colors. If you'd like to see the full step-by-step photo tutorial, head on over to the Ranger Project Tutorials Page!

Bokeh Batik

One of my favorite things about working with Ranger Archival Inks is that you can do a lot of the fun little tricks I love about watercolor, but instead of working with water, you use 91% Isopropyl Alcohol. BUT... for sciencey reasons I don't entirely understand, the fact that you're using alcohol instead of water means you can be working on fairly thin paper or cardstock and it won't warp or rip or pill or otherwise hurt your substrate.

In this case, I used an ink blending tool to add all of my Archival colors, letting them overlap a bit to create new shades in between; then I flicked on LOTS of droplets of clear alcohol, over and over, blotting them each time to pick up a little color. Until I finally had this very cool effect that almost looks textured. And, as you can see, my page is not lumpy. bumpy, ripped or wrinkly. Some of the color DOES seep through to the back of the page, however, something you might like to keep in mind if you try this fun "trick".

BTW, all of the above is just one tiny little portion of information I've learned from the very awesome Wendy Vecchi, and if you aren't watching her Tip Tuesday videos on Instagram or Facebook, you are realllllly missing out!