2019 #16 Stamp Carving: Tiptoe Through the Tulips with ELB {by Lucy Edmondson}

2019 Topic 16: Stamp Carving

Some more stamp carved loveliness from Lucy whose use of vibrant watercolour crayons really make Lin Brown's images burst from the book pages. She's got some great uses for gesso too.

Hi everyone, it's Lucy here from Lucy's True Colours, bringing you a card for the stamp carving theme using Lin Brown stamps and Caran D'Ache Neocolor II watercolour Crayons.

I am a huge Lin Brown fan, so when I heard the theme was carved stamps, I immediately thought of the earlier stamp sets Lin had brought out in this style. I thought it would be fun for a change to look at some of the different techniques you can do using Neocolor II crayons, which are the watercolour ones. I love how the colours become so vibrant and easily blendable when water is added! As you will see, it can also be subtracted with a stencil. My choice of stamps was easy: I love tulips, and I particularly love to see them in gardens as they flop so quickly in a vase. They have such an immense colour range. My Mum bought a random bag of bulbs from a magazine and the two of us were fascinated every year when some incredibly dark purple, almost black, tulips, as big as wine goblets popped up every Spring! This informed my colour palette today, although I took artistic licence and had to go quite a bit paler as the stormy black looked terrible!

What I found in making this project is that brushing a layer of gesso over your watercolour card will further aid the blending of your crayon background.

I picked out my crayon colour choices to give a graduated effect, starting with earth colours to ground the tulip, moving through the yellows, peaches, oranges, and reds, and scribbled them in overlapping lines across my gessoed watercoloured card.

A wash of water back and forth on my brush to bring out the vibrancy. Love this bit!

I stamped the tulip from Eclectica ELB03 onto book text and added three shades of purple crayon.

Then a touch of water on my brush to bring it to life. I used the same colours for my text.

I stamped the tulip stem from Eclectica ELB03 in Fresco Finish Hey Pesto and Hyde Park onto the crayon background. I used Lin's circle stencil 001 and a baby wipe to remove a little of the colour. I added the word Tulip from Eclectica ELB23 and the words Flowers Whisper What Words Cannot Say from Eclectica ELB05.

To finish off, I matted and layered the watercolour piece onto a black and white piece of cardstock and then onto a black A4 card. In this close up you can see the book text on the tulip.

It was so great working with Lin's stamps and the Neocolor crayons. You can also experiment with using the crayons directly onto the stamps, spritzing, and stamping, for a watercolour effect. I definitely want to use them more often!

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