I really love creating scenery cards, and for me I can’t go past a beautiful sunset.

I have seen so many sunsets in so many places around the world. One place that always comes to mind for me when I think of beautiful sunsets is a town called San Gregorio de Polanco in Uruguay. We needed to kill a few days whilst we were waiting to go an visit / work / stay at an Estancia so we headed to this small town to chill. It’s a small place of only around 3500 people on the banks of an artificial lake called Lago Rincon del Bonete. Every single night (well every night we were there….and we were told it was the norm) there was the most amazing sunsets. I have no idea exactly how many photos we took of this sunset, but suffice to say it would have been in the hundreds, and from memory we were only there 2 or 3 nights. Every time you looked away and looked back there was a different yellow / orange / pink / black combo. It was truly gorgeous. Here is just one of the photos we took:

But I digress – this is not the photo I used for inspiration in tonights card. I would love to re-create this photo one day, but my skills of creating the right amount of shimmer and reflection in the water are very much lacking. Something to work on right?

Tonight I decided to just do a very simple sunset scene. I used a sponge brayer instead of sponges for most of the background (I did sponge a little to try to smooth some of the blending a little better). For the sun I used a 2.5″ circle as a mask. The colours in the sunset are daffodil delight, peekaboo peach and watermelon wonder. The black landscape in the bottom was created using a torn piece of paper as a mask. I held it in place and used a sponge brayer with basic black ink. The brayer allows me to get a really black image without getting my fingers covered in ink. I then moved the torn mask up and offset it a bit and did a second round of brayering, this time not as dark so as to create depth and dimension to the scene.

Lastly I added the silhouette flying birds. Then I tried to think about where to put a sentiment, and what sentiment to put. In the end I couldn’t think of something good, nor a good spot to put it so I left it off. I decided that I could always add a sentiment to the inside. Is that weird? Should you put a sentiment of some kind on the front of all cards?

In summary, the sponge brayer is a very easy to use tool, that is reasonably cheap as well. the sponges rinse out under the tap. Some inks will stain them, but the staining doesn’t affect their future use by other colours. I also seem to stay a lot cleaner when using the brayer as opposed to sponges. At this stage I could never create a You Tube video as when I craft my hands tend to resemble a fingerprinting toddler!