Craft A Scene - Majestic Mountains 1

Hi folks, this is my first post as a newbie member of  the Craft A Scene  DT, and the brief was to create a project with the theme of Majestic Mountains.  This is my first offering, and sent my brain into overload, trying to decide how best to achieve my ideas.

Recipe:-

Supersmooth white card

Stampscape mountain stamp

Clarity stamps - castle, moonshadow,and small fir tree

Hobby Art stamp - bird

Adirondacks - Pitch Black, Slate, Cloudy Blue, Juniper

Big and Juicy - Sunset

Speedball brayer

Splodge Mat

Make up sponges

Derwent watercolour pencils

The first problem was to find the right mountain image.  I wanted a whole range of mountains, so I did quite a lot of masking and then stamping over the masks with the Stampscape stamp to achieve multiple peaks.   I create the masks by stamping several times on to the sticky edge of a Post-It-Note, then cutting out as many as comfortable with the scissors - after all, cutting out is the pain so it makes sense to cut as many as possible in one go.  (Cut them so that they are fractionally smaller than the original image, which helps to avoid a white halo around your stamped image later in the process)  

As with all stamping, I stamped the front image first, then masked that off and stamped again in a different position.  I repeated that process until I had the mix I liked.  I used Adirondack Pitch Black for all the stamping, and for the mountains, which I wanted to be slightly faded  into the background, I stamped first on scrap paper before doing the final image.  I had also cut out a copy of the mountains on a piece of copy paper, and used that as a mask while I brayered the sky.  At this point, I dug out my trusty Hobby Art stamp of the bird of prey, and put that in just above the mountains, making sure it was a good dark image - first generation ink - as it needed to look as though it was in the foreground.

The sky was the point at which my wonderful new Splodgeaway Mat came into its own with a vengeance.  I masked the mountains, the bird and the sun, and started with Cloudy Blue on the brayer.  I kept going back to the mat to reload the brayer until I had the level of colour I needed.  Then I added a little purplish colour from the Big and Juicy in pad in the corners. 

The castle stamp is from the Clarity Stamp range, which as quality photo polymer stamps, makes it possible to place them exactly in the right place.   I was going to place it on the edge of a lake, but I did not like the lake when I had done it, so I just chopped that bit off.  Then it was back to Clarity again for the small fir tree, which I used to try to blend the mountains and the lowland together without too much of a hard edge.  I used the tree with mostly second and third generation ink so tha I got some sort of idea of perspective, pushing some right back into the background.  I also masked the base of the tree with a piece of copy paper so that I finished with trees of differing sizes.

To ground the trees and the castle, I used  Adirondack Juniper on a make up sponge just to dab colour very lightly.  Yellow on a make up sponge was also dabbed lightly for the sun.  The shadow round the moon was another Clarity stamp, a very useful one.

Once all the inks were thoroughly dry, I used a green Derwent watercolour pencil, just as a dry pencil, to add a little colour to mountain meadows.  The only other addition I made was a bit of glitter, with a Quickie glue pen, allowed to dry and then sprinkled with Martha Stewart fine glitter, just to highlight areas of the mountains and the castle.  As usual, the glitter does not show up on the photo, but it is there, honestly.

To finish the card, I trimmed the topper carefully, watching to see whether I was happy with each cut, and mounted it onto black card with a very thin border, then onto an A4 piece of white pearlescent card.  I was not sure if I need to do more, but when my husband said he really liked it, I decided it was time to leave well alone.

I had a quick look at the card from another of the DT, Sally , who, quite independently, has used the same buzzard image from Hobby Art.  Great minds think alike, but still produce very different results.  Nice one, Sally.

I hope you like it as much as my husband did.  I am looking forward to showing you more of my projects during my time on the DT.  Come and join us over at Craft A Scene and see what you can do.  Can't wait to see your pieces of work.  We have a different theme each month, so come on and have a go.

PS My  husband read this post and pointed out that there is a language problem between the UK/Europe and our friends in North America concerning the name "buzzard".  If you want to read the info for yourself, just go to the Britannica version.  The buzzard Sally and I have used in our cards is the Common Buzzard (Buteo buteo) and is not found in North America.  OK, that is the end of the lesson for today.

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