NEW PA Products: Eclectica³ {Everything Art}

Hi Everyone, 

Leandra here with the final release of 2016 from Kasia Avery of {Everything Art}.

Kasia has brought another beautiful stamp set to their collection, now making four for 2017. We have been shipping these to our stockists for the last 2 weeks, so you should be able to buy them now from your favourite PaperArtsy stockist now.

Collage stamps are my first love as far as genre goes, and this stamp is very emotive. The feature stamp hints at being courageous, following your heart, being bold. I think its gorgeous, the mask on the image suggests that she is hiding part of herself, there are 2 sides to her nature: fire and ice. maybe only revealed when she chooses. I love that this can be interpreted so many ways, privacy, secrecy, observing others with intent, keeping some things special.

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The other elements are so useful, stars make a wonderful background element, and the word block is somewhat illegible if polish is not your language, but it is of course personal to Kasia, and I think that is lovely that she has that piece of herself and her history on there, a piece of her culture, her language, a reminder of her family and friends now she is resident in England. You so have to be brave to move to another country, and she has followed her heart, recently married Jamie, so this set of stamps certainly seems to have that journey closely represented in the designs within.

I took a few hours to enjoy playing with them, nothing too tricky, 4 colours of paint, a palette knife, paintbrush and black inkpad. Elements were layered, more colour added, some gel pen accents.

Making the backgrounds used for all cards

Step One: Applying paint to the BG

I grabbed some smoothy cardstock (heavyweight) and chose 4 colours of paint.  Amethyst, Sugar Plum, Haystack, Caribbean Sea, and then applied those with a palette knife directly onto the sheet of card. 

First Haystack, I love this yellow opaque, a useful base for almost any project. Also great to warm up Blush when doing skin tones.

I like to start with an opaque, then head to the darkest, in this case Amethyst.

Then knocked it back with the 2 medium tone colours, Caribbean Sea and Sugar Plum. I never like it much at this point, and my answer is to add Snowflake, however, I did like the idea of what the pops of colour would look like with the collage stamp on top, so I was Ok with it. Reaching a compromise, I decided to use Snowflake mixed 50:50 with Matte Glaze to soften, and applied with a flat paintbrush to some of the background. 

About 2/3 of the sheet was knocked back, and the other 1/3 was left bright. I had no idea where I was heading, but quite liked the idea of keeping my options open.

So then I had a few leftover puddles of paint on my craft sheet. I added more Matte Glaze to those, and painted them out onto another piece of card, creating a softer background. Plus this made new colours where Haystack blended with blues and purples to make shades that still worked with the overall colour scheme.

Step 2: Stamping in black

I simply stamped over the top of the various sections with the main collage stamp in Jet Black Archival Ink, and then also added some of the word block in a Haystack/ Sugar Plum to some scraps. I love the contrast of layers - this is where Fresco Chalk (and therefore proper opaque) Paints are so easy to layer up. This was onto the softer background.

This onto the purple end of the softened BG, and me sussing out how the layers might work.

Step 3: faff and titivate
On the first sample, she needed to pop off the amethyst background, so the easiest way was to add blush paint to her face and arms, a tad of shading with Haystack and Toffee to her Hair and skin, and Claret with Blush to the cheeks. Her dress was a mix of Bougainvillea and Blush . I find it much easier to blend transluscents with an opaque for the first layer - both wet- this way you automatically get a more creamy mix. Then I add the transluscent to the edges for shading and depth.

Step 4: Layers for mounting
As I was kind of thinking cards by this point, I decided to go old school with plain layers alternating with plain card layers and some of my self-made backgrounds. Adding black to the brightest of layers with the stars and word stamps also links to the black-stamped image.

Step Five: Accents
I don't seems to be able to stay away for the white gel pens of sharpie paint pen! Dots are one thing ...

And the white gel pen on the font on the Heart stamp allowed the text to really pop when the white gel pen was used.

And little swipes of white catchlights on the 'courage' bottles too.

I haven't even bothered to add any embellishments to the cards, just left them nice and simple. I think when you use vintage style stamps with bright colours, and letting the white dominate, it creates a whole different style to the traditional vintage look.

These stamps are available now from your favourite PaperArtsy stockist, as you know,  we urge you to support your local independent retailer.

Well done to Kasia for another great stamp release! If you want to book onto Kasia and Jamie's online programme, Wanderlust, you can book now for 2017, and we are thrilled to announce that we will continue to collaborate with them to release more stamps next year too! See the video below for Wanderlust information.

Enjoy!

~Leandra