Visible Image Wednesday.

Hi folks

Happy Wednesday guys and dolls ( mostly dolls haha),  Visible Image Wednesday of course , I hope you are all having a really good week and that you are starting to see some lighter nights at last I can't believe I came out of work tonight and the sky was still slightly blue and it was light wooooo. Isn't it such a relief.... Don't I sound old haha...

Anyway I hope you all fancy a good old Inky treat today cos did I get covered making this one, I had it on my face and my hands were simply so covered I had to bleach them to get them clean haha.. I love it.... best place to be elbows deep in inky glory.. who agrees? and who prefers the clean paper styles then or do we have some budding mixed media artists here today , what is your favourite styles folks....
That's the fab thing about being on a team  you get to see so many styles and talents and enjoy the way several people all look at a stamp set with a different perspective. Visible Image have a great blog too which shows the whole teams talents so be sure to grab a cuppa put your feet up and have a browse if you get a minute or 30.

Today's card as I said is very inky and features a very newly released stamp set from a new collection and this one is called Behind every Mask and as soon as I saw it I knew it was right up my ally so what do you think?.

Isn't it different... the stamp set is the bird and the sentiment the rest I have drawn in and used several techniques to show of this glorious set to its full potential.
Here is a close up of the picture.

To start this one I took a white piece of card and pulled out several Distress inks , Black Soot chipped Sapphire, Faded jeans, Dusty Concord and Milled lavender.
I also used a template I made with another new stamp in Visible Image Background stamps range called Orbital. I stamped out the image once and cut it out, made it tacky on one side and stuck it down on the page slightly moving off the top of page.

I also had a doily die cut I had cut out with a scallopy edge so I tore that in half to use for the cloud edges. (use what you have folks).

For the skyline I took some white card and freehand cut the shapes of some buildings out I held it by hand onto the bottom of the card and used black soot all through the stencil to just put down the basic image.

I worked lots of the colours on the rest of the card  quite patchy which does not matter for a sky at all, as naturally it would be. Keep the area around the moon lighter though as we need to show the reflections and the edges of clouds etc.
I also used the edge of a piece of cut and dry to drag in some ink in lines across the moon and from outside edges of the card in and kept the lines soft and blended but you can still see them very well.
Once I had the depth of colour in the card I spritzed it with water  left a few seconds and blotted with kitchen paper and removed some of the ink, I also dropped some bigger water droplets and left then blotted them off. All these different times we layer and spritz and blot creates a much more real lifelike image which makes it more believable and less cartoon. ( you know what I mean don't you haha). I went through the sky with a water brush too taking a Little colour away from cloud edges and blotting again with plain water. This works with this ink and say adirondack and any other water soluble inks but not with an oil based ink like archival.

Nice and close here for you to see the sky and how bright the moon looks once the template is removed and a few lighter clouds are added and some glitter around the cloud bars across the front.
So to those roof tops.
I used again the same technique in two parts firstly i took a paintbrush and painted plain water onto the tiles of the roof's waited a few seconds and dabbed the colour off this lightened it a fair bit but not with the light you see above so the 2nd stage was to take a white drawing ink and add a little water to it to make it very fluid  I then used the same technique with a solution of the water and white ink and then dabbed it off which gave me this fab light grey base to work with , I then used sepia ink and white ink to highlight edges in its pure form.I drew in stars in the sky and painted some white in the eyes in the birds wings to make them stand out as if they stare at you. lastly on the actually picture part of this card I used some glitter under the bird sparkling in the moonlight and on the roofs too, not to much but enough to look very special , without looking festive as I did not want that look.

Of course I had some matting and layering to do on Aubergine card and cream card which matched greatly with the darker colours , I also stamped my sentiment in perfect medium and used a white embossing powder for the words to stand out nicely.

I love this card and of course this weekend was the huge tradeshow at Birmingham NEC for the trade to show off lots of new goodies coming up this year from a range of companies and I must say the Visible Image stand looked simply divine  I hope Helen and Mark don't mind me sneaking a facebook photo to show how amazing they created their booth with all their and our hard work on cards we all certainly make a great team for sure.

Didn't they do an awesome job on the layout of all our cards and the promo posters at the top. Retro and gorgeous with the Black and white table cloths. Stunning Helen and Mark I wish I could have got there to see you all but definitely the next one.

So the stamp set I used for this one as I said is called Behind every Mask and it looks like this.

                                                                       "Amazing"

I also used this one Called orbital to create the moon template but I will show you cards in the coming weeks creating just this stamp on its own for some awesome backgrounds too.

                                                                         'Orbital'.

Well I hope you like this one so here is a final look at today's card.

Look forward to reading your comments and I will see you back here tomorrow.

Lots of love 

to all my lovelies

Kim 

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