Soft and simple, sweet little Pix in the spotlight.

Hi everybody,

Jill here, and this week, I've gone soft and simple with a bit of design spotlighting...

...putting Mama Elephant's Pix's Favourite's in the spotlight!

Such a gorgeous set, it just seems to go hand in hand with a delicate design.

I started with a piece of watercolour card cut down to a panel using Lawn Fawn's Stitched rectangles.  I die-cut an off-centre circle, so that it edged off my card; to that circle, I cut Lawn Fawn's Forest Border and the cloud from Mama Elephant's Landscape Trio.  I then watercolour washed my background and my elements using Distress Inks.  I really wanted my background to be the softest of soft washes, so really watered down my inks and blotted the back as soon as I'd put the colour down to the point it's barely visible in the pictures, but looks really lovely and subtle in real life.

Once everything was dry, I added a sun die-cut from Lawn Fawn's Spring Showers and in-lad all my pieces back in place.  At this point I thought my spotlight circle was getting lost in the pale expanse of the background, and it wasn't really 'popping' like I wanted it to, so I added a border of grey patterned paper behind to help it stand out.

I then stamped out my main focal image, this delightful little bunny (Pix, I assume?), and little tree stump from Pix's Favourite's.  You get a load of different designs in this set, each one as adorable as the next, but with her little butterfly, I felt this one would work perfect with my design.  I coloured her using Zig Clean Colour Real Brush Pens, again, keeping it as light and gentle as I possibly could by adding a lot of water to my ink, and blotting often.  I then fussy-cut my image and mounted on top of my spotlight using foam tape.

I then stamped out my sentiment from the same Pix's Favourite set onto vellum in black ink, heat embossed, and adhered with just the teeniest bit of wet glue along the top, masked by the crosses from the stitched rectangle borders.

I added a few little bits of ribbon to embellish, cut into flags and banners and tucked into a little label, and finished off with a couple of black enamel hearts to tie the whole design together.

I really hope you like it, and as always, everything I used is linked blow.

see you next week.

Jillx

Creating Faux Filters

Hi everybody,

Jill here, and this week, I'm creating my own faux photography filters...

Using Mama Elephant's Pix's Favourite's as my main focus.

I used to love creating this kind of sepia effect but hadn't tried it in ages so thought I'd give it another blast.

It's such a simple, yet effective technique.  You simply stamp your design out in a brown ink, and colour your images monochramaticially (is that a word?  You get what I mean...several tones of the same colour).  I used various brown Distress Inks and watercoloured my images, but you could use pens, or pencils, or whatever your favourite colouring medium is, to achieve the same look.  I also introduced an accent colour of pink to add a little warmth and help the heart to stand out.

I used My Favourite Things Geometric Grid to stamp onto my background and white heat embossed. I then brushed more of the same colour inks across it creating a matching wash, and used Lawn Fawn's Say Cheese die to frame to my coloured image.

I enjoyed this technique so much and really loved the result, I felt it looked like I'd put a cool vintage filter over my images, so decided to try out the same thing again but in black and white this time;  and here's where that took me...

I used Mama Elephant's In My Heart and Spring Garden to create my black and white design, and used the exact same technique, just using black and grey inks, again, with a splash of pink.  I've also seen a load of simple blue & white designs, like the look you get on crockery and bone china, and that looks awesome too, so maybe I'll give that a go next.  I was thinking you could try it in any colour and I bet the result would be really interesting...like your own personal Instagram for your cards :)

I really hope you like them, and as always, everything I used is linked below.

See you next week.

Jillx