Favorite Background Techniques: New Challenge for You at Lost Coast Designs

Hi friends! There's a new art challenge/contest up over at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity--enter your art using rubber stamps (any company) featuring your favorite background technique for a chance to win badges for your blog and gift certificates for free rubber from Lost Coast Designs!

As a member of the LCD design team, I hereby present you with a project to inspire you to enter. This ATC, "Lesson 175," uses one of my very favorite background techniques: stamping and stenciling on a gelli print. I love the complexity and depth and dimension this gives to the finished piece! And of course, the delightfully weird bird-bug from LCD is just da bomb.

I'll be back later with a more in-depth look on how I made this card, but for the moment, I leave you with these pix. Hope you'll get creative and enter your art in the challenge!

And a second shot, tilted, to show the shimmer of the wings and the dimension:

As always, I look forward to your comments below letting me know that you've visited. Thanks for stopping by!

New Stamp Art Challenge: Steampunk Queen of Hearts

Hiya stampies!

There's another fun contest running over at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity, this time on the theme of "Steampunk Queen of Hearts"! Just enter your themed art using rubber stamps by midnight on February 24 for your chance to win blog badges and gift certificates for free rubber at the incredible Lost Coast Designs, purveyors of some of the quirkiest and most interesting images around.

Here's my project to get you going. It features Lost Coast Designs' gears background stamp behind the action, with the Queen giving orders to Steampunk Icarus to chase down the Steampunk Balloon Guys who are getting away!

I'll be back in a few days with a step-by-step of how this piece was made, including a tip on how I got the cool 3D effect on the gears in the center of the piece. Check back!

Can't wait to see what you come up with for your own Steampunk Queen of Hearts. Click here for all the contest details and get stampin'!

Vintage Perfume ATC, or, Photostamp Sale at The Stampsmith's Etsy Shop! :(

Greetings Stampy Ones!

I have recently learned that the zesty, talented, creative, beautiful-inside-and-out Estelle of The (famed) Stampsmith has shut down her website and is liquidating her stock of remarkable rubber stamps on Etsy!!!!!

[gently weeps]

Yeah, it's the end of a stamping era.

In tribute to the legacy of the great Stampsmith, renowned for its "photostamp" images--stamps so finely made that the stamped prints can be indistinguishable from photographs--I wanted to share with you some art that I have made, to hopefully inspire you to

run don't walk!!!

...over to The Stampsmith's Etsy store to snap up some of these iconic images before they are gone forever.  :(

Here is an ATC inspired by vintage perfume ads, featuring The Stampsmith's Classic Couple stamp (currently still available as of this writing!):

Yeah, that's a rubber stamp. #NotAPhoto

Cool, huh?

I made this card in tones of gray and silver, using shades of metallic purple watercolor for extra shimmery oomph on the flowers and brand name. I collaged on a bit of silver foil-lace and added a border of liquid silver embossing powder for more texture and shine.

The metallic effects don't always photograph well, so here's another shot of the card in different lighting. Here you can even see the shimmer in the purple:

Anyway, if you love vintage images...and/or rubber stamps...and/or cool stuff in general, do visit The Stampsmith in its final weeks. I don't know of anyplace else you can get stamps quite like these. ;-(

P.S. As always, I welcome your comments below. Have you used photostamps before?

Mini Gallery: Ladies of the French Revolution

Here's a series of three ATCs I did that all feature eighteenth-century ladies in elaborate hats and embossing powder "seals" that I thought seemed reminiscent of how letters used to be sealed with wax.

Another thing that ties this series together is the use of a particular shade of Twinkling H20s, a shimmery watercolor paint. The shade is called "Scarab Beetle" and it is an "interference" color, meaning that it looks like one color when light hits it a certain way, and a different color when viewed from a different angle--in this case, the two metallic colors are a kind of pinkish copper and an olive color. Really gorgeous in person...reminiscent of soie changeante, a French silk that looks different in different lights.  :)

I. "Un Chapeau Magnifique"

II. "Au Bal III"

III. "Secrets of the Fan"