Six Flower Cards with AB {by Liesbeth Fidder-de Vos}

Hello everyone, Liesbeth here with you today for showing you the beauty of two PaperArtsy stamp sets by Alison Bomber. I'd also love to show you some fun ways to use Infusions

This time I chose this two beauties: The Apple Blossom, PaperArtsy EAB46 and the Coneflowers, PaperArtsy EAB49. Although they're not exactly the same style, I think they work together perfectly. Just look at all those beautiful flowers! 

I will also work with three summer colours of PaperArtsy Infusions Dye Stain: Are You Cerise, Slime and Sunset Beach

I decided to make a few pretty cards. After all, who wouldn't enjoy receiving a beautiful card filled with flowers? This is how I made them:

On a piece of smooth watercolor paper, I sprinkled just a little of three Infusions colors along the left side. After spritzing it with water, I let the colors blend together into a vibrant burst of color. While everything was still wet, I inked up the text stamp (EAB46) directly from the background and stamped it onto the right side. So instead of using an ink pad, you're actually using the card itself as your ink source

After letting the card dry well I stamped some fragments of the text and some flowers from Stamp set PaperArtsy EAB49 with Tsukineko StazOn - Jet Black. This ink stays deep black even if you use bleach, which I use a lot

And yesss , here comes the bleach. Infusions work really well with bleach; every color of Infusions bleaches differently, it is always a surprise. I  started to ,paint' the petals with a synthetic brush and watered down bleach. If it doesn't bleach enough, I use pure bleach, but first I give it a bit of time.

At the left side you can see I also stamped with bleach. Put a drop of bleach onto a craft sheet or big acrylic block, spread it out to a very thin layer and use it as an inkpad.... bleachpad ;-)

After the bleach was dry, this card was a bit to white, it needed a bit of colour so I painted the flowers lightly with watered down Infusions.

Being a firm believer in the 'more is more' philosophy, I couldn't stop there! I stamped a few more leaves around the edges in light green ink (Versafine Clair-Avocado) and finished the card with a beautiful sentiment in black.

It's not really a technique, but I just had to show you this. It's one of the other cards I made. When working with Infusions, little surprises often appear on your paper. In this case, a beautiful 'flower' suddenly emerged all by itself. It wasn't planned at all—it just happened naturally. I love moments like that!

A detail of the ,flower' on the finished card, love it!

Before showing you my six cards, I would love to tell something about other finishing touches I did

 

This beautiful Apple blossom stamp from EAB46 is the focal point on one of the cards and it needed to pop out a bit more, so I drew a shadow around it with charcoal pencil and smudged it out with my finger

In my opinion this card needed very strong. bright coloured flowers. I coloured them with a pink Ecoline marker.

Here I coloured the leaves at the right side after drying (stamp-in-Infusions-technique) with only water; the water automatically absorbs and spreads colour from the infusions.

Two pictures to show you the bleaching effects again. The light text in the background are stamped with bleach. It`s important to clean your stamp immediately after stamping with bleach

And...after mixing up both PaperArtsy stamp sets EAB46 and EAB49 and having lots of fun making the Infusions backgrounds I ended up with these six cards

The Summer card is the one I showed you step-by-step above

I extended the stem by drawing with a black fineliner

Springtime and Postcard.

I secretly used an extra stamp here (PaperArtsy EAB21)...because the text matches so perfectly. The small birds nest stamp is stamped with a dark red ink and masked before I stamped the flower

The shadowed apple blossom and the Imagine card with the strange Infusions flower :-)

It was such a joy to create with these wonderful PaperArtsy products once again. I absolutely love the endless possibilities of Infusions, and combined with the beautiful floral stamps designed by Alison Bomber, they made creating this blog post a real pleasure.

I hope I've been able to inspire you and perhaps given you some ideas to try for yourself. Have lots of fun creating, and I'll see you again next time. Thank you so much for stopping by and taking a look!

Liesbeth XX

Blog: Liesbeth`s Arts & Crafts

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3 Things - Infused Tissue Journey {by Floss Nicholls}

Hi everyone, it's Floss from flossWORKSHOPart with you today for a 'With 3 Things' challenge post.

This feature on the PaperArtsy Blog is where 3 identical items are sent to 3 members of the PaperArtsy Blogging team. Typically we will receive a stamp, a stencil and a colour product.

We have no clue what PaperArtsy HQ is going to send, the whole idea of this challenge is to do something crafty in our personal style with these 3 items.

We can incorporate other PA products into the mix if we feel it is necessary.

So let's take a look at what I received from PA HQ ...

So there was no stencil this time...but I received tissue paper and some card stock too.  It got me thinking straight away how I had never tried infusions on tissue paper before so it was the very first thing I did.

I started by sprinkling a little of The Sage Infusions onto my paint palette and sprayed the palette with water. I then used the colour to paint some detail onto the Seth Apter Printed Tissue paper. I painted the infusions on the front of the tissue.

I did not over mix the infusions dye stain so that it would allow the colour variants to still remain visible with the brush stroke.  I was fearful that the tissue might rip when I applied the water (as I use water to rip tissue regularly) but I did not pull the tissue...I let it dry.  The tissue paper was strong enough to take the 'wet' and so I thought I would become more bold in my approach and started to fill in areas with my brush.

I decided that parts of the tissue needed to be vibrant and so...

I used PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Heavy Cream acrylic paint on the reverse of the tissue paper and only after the infusions was fully dry to make the infusions colour more opaque and the areas where there was no infusions to be a solid strong cream. I did not add water to the acrylic as I did not want to reactivate the infusions dye stain.

There is definitely an obvious difference where I painted the ovals with the heavy cream as you can see here within the numbered areas with the cream vs the space around it left clear of paint.

The variety of colours within The Sage infusions was remarkable and so to give me more colour range in density I decided to sprinkle some infusions onto the Heavy Cream Acrylic on my paint palette...

I used it to paint other areas on the reverse of the Seth Apter tissue paper leaving the grains unmixed so that the dye would 'do it's own thing' within the paint.

It gave me so much more of an individual and slightly uncontrolled outcome.

Sprinkling a few grains of the infusions directly onto areas of the Seth Apter tissue and then spraying it made me wonder if I'd taken it a step too far, but again, the tissue held up to the wet spray! It gave me a softer palette with less of the powder being used.

I started looking at areas that were the same size as the provided card stock.  To do this, I used the card to draw around and cut a window out to audition certain areas of the tissue.

It was a tough decision which areas of the tissue to use...or whether to use the whole window framed area...or whether to collage various different parts of the tissue to cover the framed area.  I used the frame to guide my wet brush to rip different boxes from the whole tissue paper.

I then glued the sections I ripped onto the card stock and waited for them to fully dry.

Whether I decide to use the little cards as ATC trading cards, mount them together as a tryptic or in a square grid, for me, they needed more texture and attention to detail...and so by using PaperArtsy mini rubber stamps EM137 and EM141, I added further texture embossed detail to each card with opaque vanilla WOW Embossing powder.

And then collaged again over the top to create further texture.

I used partial stamps on this one...I like a little hint of embossing here and there. I achieved this by attaching masking tape over parts of the stamp after I'd pressed it into the embossing ink pad and before pressing it onto the paper, it allowed me to place the numbers strategically around the tissue design...

Using paper masks over the tissue design allowed me to add an embossed design section to each of the cards...

These two cards are still awaiting embossed details but I am now thinking that I could add stitching to elements of these cards...and maybe the others too...I guess it is because a lot of my art has stitching involved.

It seems that I am guilty of thinking I have finished a piece of art only to look at it a few days later and wonder what else I can add or change. Are you like that too? Looking at these images again now that they are on a big screen in front of me, I think they need stitching and that they could be used as journal fronts too...

It was a fun exploration and one I shall definitely be using again!

I hope that you will try this if you haven't already...

Much love,

Floss x x x

YouTube: @flossworkshopart 

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I couldn't resist it...I added some stitching...