A Two Stamp Background - VISIBLE IMAGE

The Friday Feature - with Visible Image

Morning all! It has been a frantic couple of weeks for my friends at Visible Image what with trade shows and TV launches. But they are certainly not complaining about the amount of work they had to do. Quite the opposite. Thanks to a very successful Trade Show and sell-out TV shows they are enjoying a surge in orders and new customers. Well done Helen and Mark! I already knew you were brilliant at what you do, now everybody knows!

For my blog today I am going to concentrate on a couple of stamps from the new range of Sentiments which launched on the TV nearly a week ago. Being on the Design Team is such fun as we get to play ehem, WORK with some lovely products well before you see them. For me these initial samples are not about adding embellishments, or using die-cuts, I like to use just the stamps and ink. I like the stamp to go it alone, to show you what it can do. We aren't all blessed with a cavern of stash.

Various shades of pink with black over-stamping. 

This step-by-step will show you how I created the flower background on two of my cards made for the TV launch. 

I wanted to create a shaded image of the daisy-like flower from the Happy Birthday set so I went for 3 shades of pink/red. You could use any colours you like. Don't be afraid to experiment! Of course you could use one colour but the main thing is to stick to fairly light colours for this stage.

I don't own a crafting mat, you know the brown non-stick ones but to be honest I am happy using what comes to hand and also I like to make my equipment multi-purpose. Acrylic blocks are great as paint pallets as they are easy to clean. I squished each of my ink pads directly onto the block. If you are worried about mixing colours on the pad while doing this squishing thing then it doesn't matter at this stage if the colours don't meet up.

By having a larger portion of one colour than the others means that my overall colour scheme would be, in this case, an autumn shade of red with the 2 other colours, bright pink and hot pink, playing more of a minor, highlighting sort of role.

Using the flower from the Happy Birthday set, I loaded up the stamp by pressing into the colours on the acrylic block. Move around the block a bit to blend the colours. Those gaps you can see in the picture above will vanish. Each time you load up your stamp move around the acrylic block to pick up different colours. (If it starts to get a bit dry simply spray the block lightly with water and stamp that onto a piece of paper to use later and re-apply new ink to the block.)

If the ink is very wet you may want to stamp-off some of the wetness first onto another piece of card. I would want to keep these stamped-off images for another project as I hate waste! A tip for you to get a good even spread of images is to start in the middle of your page and then add 6 more images around it like a flower. Then go round again keeping the spacing even. It is very difficult to get an even pattern if you start at the edge!

Once I had the full page of the base flowers I went on to adding the feathery flower image from the Thank You set. I used a dark red for this. Although lining up exactly over a particular base flower is not essential,     it is super easy with these stamps to get good central placement. They are clear and so you can see through the mount block! Keep turning the stamp around to avoid any obvious repeat in direction. 

Above you can see some other combinations using the same technique. I found an ink pad at the back of my drawer which had several shades of blue in the one pad, but it was a little bit on the dry side. Not good for using on its own but it really didn't matter here. Being a pre-blended pad meant I could get the shaded effect straight from the ink pad onto the stamp. Can you see the little white lines left in the stamped images where the separate colours are in the pad? Well they won't matter as they will be covered up in the next round of stamping anyway! Similarly, if your base image is a little blurred or smudged it probably wont show once you have stamped over with the other image. Mind you, these Visible Image stamps all stamp perfectly so it won't happen!! I used a darker shade of blue to do the over stamping. I also did some with some paint. These were a little darker but still worked OK. I put small dots of water based paints onto the acrylic block and picked up the ink in the same way as I did before. I used jet black for the over stamping. 

You could make lots of different backing pages like this, ready to use in your projects. If you use an acrylic block like I did for the pink one, you could also use up the residue on the block as the background for the main image. This means no waste and it matches perfectly. This is what I did for the pink one above. Those eagle-eyed readers will notice that I had used a different sized block!

Multi-colour base flower with black over-stamping

I hope you have enjoyed this blog. You can pick up these stamps, and many more from the Visible Image online shop. Click on the images below to take you straight there!

        

Don't forget there is also the Facebook group, the Visible Image blog and the other DT blogs where you can get inspiration, up load your makes and meet up with like minded people.

There are only a few hours left to enter the February challenge, but if you have got time why not give it a go? The theme is LOVE. You will need to be quick, it closes at 8pm tonight.

Come back here tomorrow to see my DT inspirations for the March challenge. You are going to love the theme this month. I certainly did!

Well, off to the room of craftiness to play with my Visible Image stamps. It is a hard life but somebody has to do it!

KimB xxxxx