Bountiful Blessings

When I saw this digital stamp offered by Eureka Stamps, I fell in love with it. I love the elegance of the mallard in cattails. I combined the digi with watercolouring and traditional stamps to create a clean and simple card as a birthday card for my brother.

Challenges

AAA Cards: CAS game - Masculine
Fab 'n' Funky: Animals
Inspiration Destination: Anything Goes
Craft Your Passion: Anything Goes
Crafting From the Heart: Anything Goes
Penny's Paper-crafty: Anything Goes

Supplies

InLinkz.com

Putting It Together

I've been wanting to add some digital stamps (also called digis) to my stash. There are a wide variety of digis and their cost is substantially less than rubber. There are advantages to digis (resizing being one of them) but also limitations so they will only be an addition to my tools not a replacement of any.

Just as with their physical counterparts, it all starts with a stamp or an image. I trimmed a sheet of light watercolour paper and printed the image with my HP ink jet printer. I then sprayed the image with hair spray to 'fix' the ink so it won't smear while painting. I let the sheet dry a couple days. The need for hairspray and letting the printing sit a couple days is one of the significant limitations of digis.

Instead of my usual Distress Ink, I decided to use pan watercolours. I have a nifty stack palette with a variety of colours.

I painted the image using a water brush. I will admit that I checked photos of mallards on Google to remind me how they're coloured. 

I decided to use the sentiment from Impression Obsession for front with a 'Happy Birthday' inside. I used copper ink for the stamping. 

While stamping, I got a stray bit of green on the card base and all over my hand. I figured out it was Perfect Pearls from the bag I had packed with a few inks and colours. I was at first annoyed by the stray colour but decided I liked it so added more both inside and on the front.

On the side

The next two weeks are going to have an added challenge in environment. I'm on vacation visiting family, one of which is my brother and his family, but didn't want to leave the creating behind. Leaving it all behind would not have been a vacation for me, so.. I sacrificed some space while packing and brought along a bunch of supplies.

Inks, ribbons, embellishments, scissors, and more, packed into the checked bag because of the scissors and ink, lots and lots of ink. Yes, I did bring all of my beloved Distress Inks *laugh* I left the tins at home. I had to reduce weight a bit.

My laptop case has an overnight bag space. that became the space for my trimmer and a few different papers. The Misti was in the latop case where papers usually go.

I brought along -some- rubber stamps in the two plastic containers to the left, packed in the suitcase, and a few painting supplies into the soft sided pouch to carry in my satchel/purse (I actually use a much smaller purse and have that packed, too.

My work area is the hotel desk where I also have my laptop. I carried the brush tubes in my oversized purse with Distress markers and watercolour pencils.

I tend to craft off the cuff so having only a fraction of my stash with me is going to be interesting and challenging.