FM229 - Hello Fall

I love the masking technique.  You have to give the whole project such a lot of thought and have to plan ahead.  I'm not always good about either of those habits so doing techniques like this is really good practise for me.  This is the challenge for the Friday Mashup, you see, and I usually enjoy mashing up both options that they offer.

Use all 5 or 3 of the colors listed above

Create a project using a Masking Techniques

or Mash it Up! and create a project with the colors above and some Masking

I decided to use the Vintage Leaves stamp set and proceeded to use So Saffron and Delightful Dijon inks to stamp a strip of leaves down the centre horizontally, masking the leaves as necessary to ensure that they did not leave ink across each other.  After stamping my leaves, I masked all but a strip down the centre horizontally, masked the leaves, and then sponged the unmasked section using Marina Mist and Night of Navy for an ombre effect.  The results, after I removed all the masking, were striking.

I used my aqua painter to colour in the uninked areas of the leaves using Daffodil Delight and Early Espresso inks.  Then, in the upper left corner, I stamped my sentiment from the For All Things set using Early Espresso.  I stamped and cut out an acorn from the same set and adhered it to the lower right corner using Dimensionals.

My base cardstock is Early Espresso followed by a layer of Delightful Dijon.  I did all my stamping and sponging on a piece of Shimmery White specialty paper.

TAKE TWO

Sometimes you finish a card and then something about it just doesn't "click" for you.  This is what happened with my card today.  I didn't like the way the leaves turned out stamped in such light colours.  I'm used to more outlines and definition, I guess and this wasn't doing it for me.

Luckily I still had my fussy-cut leaves to use as a mask.  More lucky still, since the Vintage Leaves set is photopolymer, it was easy to line up the images and stamp on top of them.  I did exactly that using Early Espresso ink and the look of the whole card changed immediately.  I prefer it.  I've left the original as well as my "take two" so you can decide for yourself if you prefer the outlined, more darkly stamped image or one that is stamped with colours close to the ones with which you filled the images.  "Take two" is the version which is going to be posted to the challenge sites.

For more examples of this fun technique, check out the Friday Mashup this week.

I've also posted my card to the Male Room challenge since it is all about Fall.