Creative Cardmaking with Astrid

 Hello lovely visitors, it's Astrid here with our monthly cardmaking tutorial. Now, before I continue, it has to be said, I used to be a card maker, but in recent years probably the only time I make cards is for Christmas, so it really took me a while to decide what on earth I would do. Well, in the end, this turned into what I have called in my own mind, "A multi-layered mixed media card". The techniques I used could be used for many other projects, not just cards and indeed mine turned into the cover of a journal. So here goes:

Here first of all, is the finished card and below I will show you what steps I took to get there.

I started by taking an A 4 size piece of strong white card and covered it with random scraps of all sorts of vintage type papers from my stash, adhering them with mat medium, in order to create a kind of master board. I then covered that with a thin layer of gesso to blend it all together a bit.

I added a second layer of gesso and then in order to give it all some more depth and interest, I added some scraps of the top layer of paper serviettes, again randomly and using mat medium.

Another thin layer of gesso followed and then I roughly tore this background into several smaller pieces.

Now, which piece to choose to make a card? In the end I chose one of the pieces that were somewhat plain, in order the create some collage elements for the focal point of my card.

Here you can see the piece I chose, and below you can see what I ended up with after I added different collage elements to this background piece.

The girl with wings is from a collage sheet I created in collaboration with my blogfriend Marjie Kemper

If you are interested, you can get instructions of how to get it as a freebie by heading over to my blog. The other elements are just bits and pieces from my stash, - some washi, music paper, old book paper and a postage stamp.

Time to bring it all together into a card.

I created a backing piece by cutting a thin piece of card large enough for my focal piece to fit on, inked around the edges and added some subtle stencilling with my current favourite Tim Holtz stencil. I cut a card base from Kraft card, created some computer generated words and made a wax seal stamp as an additional embellishment, and voila, here is my finished card.

I'll finish by showing you a few close up photos still and hope you have enjoyed this little card project.

The butterfly girls, surrounded by some subtle shadows created with Distress Crayons. I always think it helps to create depth and integrate elements when adding images, when you add some shadowing like this.

Here you can see all the different paper layers, again blended together a bit with Distress Crayon. The colours I used were Tea Dye and Gathered Twigs.

And here the wax seal, mixing together different colours of to blend in with the rest of the project. The fern wax seal impression was highlighted with Treasure Gold White Fire.

Well, that's it for today, but, to be really honest, this project never really ended up as a card, but as the cover of one of my journals... if you want you can check it out on my blog, where you can also find the promised freebie with more butterfly girls.

As  October is a month with 5 Fridays, next week you can enjoy our Tag Friday projects, and of course there is also still some time left to join our Numbers challenge.

Thanks for your visit today, Astrid

Creative Card Making with Barbara

Hello everyone! Barbara here, I'm so happy to be your Creative Guide for this month!

Today together with you, I want to start the Halloween season for this year. I couldn't resist! I used the new die by Tim Holtz, Arthur. I adore this owl, it's simply magic!

Here's the card...

Here's the tutorial, let's go!

The first thing I do when I realize a project is to choose the colour palette I want to use. For today's card, I decided two of the various colours that characterize this celebration, purple and green.

For the background I used Alcohol inks and Yupo Paper White.

Arthur is a fabulous die and it's very easy to assemble, but it requires a little bit of precision and above all it requires cutting all the pieces to be used in advance. Here they are below.

I adore Arthur's eyes and his face expression!!!

Do the same with the branch. After assembling it, I used a 3D die that creates the faux wood effect, Lumber.

To complete the first Halloween card, here is another brand new and truly versatile die, the Spider Web. I cut two of them and coated it with two embossing powders from Seth Apter, Blizzard and Rustic Indigo. I like playing with powders, overlapping them, mixing them ...

Once I got my pieces I completed the background using a stencil together with Alcohol Ink Lift. The effect is very beautiful, it is a very easy and fast technique that makes any background particular and not ordinary.

Same powder along all the edges of the card.

Now you can assemble all the pieces!

Finished! Below I took some pics of the details, hope you like them!

I hope you enjoyed reading the tutorial! If you're interested, you can find the whole list of materials that I used to create this card, on my Blog Yayascrap & more!

I also remind you that you still have a whole week to participate in our monthly Challenge: Watercolour Wonders! You can get all the details here.

Thanks for stopping by, see you soon!

Barbara