Friday Feature with Visible Image - 2 for 1 deal today!

Well hello! Hope you are having a good week? My week has been rather busy what with one thing and another. Some highlights were going to see the totally fantastic Lisbee Stainton at our local music venue. Lisbee was part of the line up recently with another one of my favourite musicians, Seth Lakeman and when I saw that she was doing a gig local to me I simply had to go! Down side of the week is this is the last week of being employed for me, my job is going, along with a few hundred other people in the same 'gang'. We are being made redundant at the end of the month and for some it is a very hard time. For me not so much, as I have major plans. Watch this space! Onwards and upwards, or in my case onwards and Westward. Say no more, a lot needs to happen in the right order..........

So, today I am going to show you 2 things using the fantastic polymer stamps by Visible Image. Always reliable, crisp images and with such fab designs it is hard for me to choose which ones to use each week!

First up is a little number I created using the Two Stamp Background which I blogged about recently. It is such a useful technique and it creates fantastic results! I mentioned before that I have a liking for 1950's kitsch textile designs, I like the colours and the bold black overprint that seems to slightly miss the mark.

I used yellow, lilac and teal inks and played on the yellow to make this bright card. The sentiment was stamped onto a piece of the card that hadn't received the black overprint with the flower head as it allowed for the words to be seen clearly.

     

Second I am going to show you a really quick way to colour a butterfly if you plan to cut it out. This is how I made the 77 butterflies for my wall art entitled 77 PAIRS OF WINGS and all my other butterfly projects, which are too many to list as I simply love the butterfly stamp!

So, it is quite simple really. Instead of colouring the butterfly after you stamp it, colour the place where the butterfly is going to be stamped first.

• Stamp your butterfly onto a piece of scrap card to get a feel for the size of it.
• Swipe stripes of colour onto your card, starting with a central 'body' coloured line then keeping them matched either side swipe more stripes until you have enough to fill the wings.
• Stamp your butterfly onto these stripes, keeping the body in the centre stripe.
• Cut it out! 

Although the stripes look very bold and, well, stripey for want of a better word, once the butterfly has been cut out it looks very natural and more importantly it looks like you have spent ages colouring it in!! You could use pencils, watercolour paint, inks, whatever you fancy really. Keep it light and make sure it is perfectly dry before you over stamp with the butterfly. I am sure you will agree the result is a very natural looking butterfly.  If you want to make more than one as I often do, then make the stripes longer!

Right my lovelies, I need to crack on with 'other' things. Hope you have been inspired by my blog today? It would be so nice to hear what you think and so please leave me a comment. I think Blogger is still being a little temperamental, an error message comes up when trying to join the blog. This is affecting a lot of blogs, not just mine, sorry. As far as I know you can still leave comments though.

Happy crafting! Kim xx