A bright and cheery bird for spring!

WELCOME BACK!

While many of us are still looking at piles of snow 

any single hint of spring is appreciated!  And so to get a jump start on spring I started thinking about putting together a collage card of happy spring tidbits. After enjoying a review of my stamps I finally decided on including 15 stamps and 2 stencils.  Then the real fun began!

I created several backgrounds to determine which would work best. Lots of bright happy springtime colors are a must for this project. I love birds so I was delighted to give the most important seat to my chick stamp (Best Stamps).  For an added treat I covered the image with 2 colors of flocking one with glitter. Doesn't everyone love the soft feel of a peep? The grasshopper is from Stampendous and the numbers stamp is by Tim Holtz as well as the dotted fade stencil behind the chick.

To create the collage I used: distress stains and inks, Wendy Veccchi archival inks, Wink of Stella, embossing powder, Viva's Pearl Pen-ice white to paint the feathers and of course the flocking.

I am entering the Mixed Media Monthly challenge. This month's challenge is Birds of a Feather. This piece with it's playful chick brings me a smile that is needed to get me through the rest of our winter's extreme temperatures and I hope it does the same for others. To me art is about lifting people's spirits.





This is also a reminder that the Mixed Media Card Challenge with a spring theme and an optional bird element is open through March 25. 


Hope spring is around the corner for you!

A Hint of Spring

Welcome back!
I just returned from my first ever vacation to miss some of our extreme weather here...after all the weather most anywhere is better than the 45 below zero that I left behind.  So I return feeling spring is closer than any other year on the 1st of March :-)

The Mixed Media Card Challenge theme this month is a Hint of Spring. And let us hope that "Spring is in the Air" when we are ready to send our cards!




I began my card with an embossed background. Watercolored with distress inks and covered with gloss medium and accented with some gold lame droplets.

The butterfly is a Tim Holtz die and stencil combo.  Using a brayer I heat embossed the high embossed areas with clear embossing powder.  And water colored wet-on-wet with distress inks.
And accented with Pearl Paint, Inka Gold and Mica Gloss. 

An newly emerging trend is the return of adding foil highlights to handmade projects.  On the left margin of my card I used packing material as the corrugated base and ironed the foil on top.  A fun way to add a little shine to a mixed media project. 


This graphic links you back to MMCC.

My design team friends also share details of their inspiration cards on their blogs. Hope you get a chance to visit them too!.

Remember the calendar tells us spring begins on March 20. Looking forward to see what you create!
...Jan