I’m Back! For those who follow my blog you will have noticed that I have been a bit absent for the last couple of weeks. I spent last week in the south west (of Western Australia) celebrating Easter with my family, and the week before that was filled with organising the holiday, and getting the kids sorted for Easter Hat parades etc!

Given this week is almost over, I decided to make one card to satisfy four challenges. I really wanted to to use the waterfront stamp set, so this is what I came up with.

The four challenges that inspired this card are the Addicted To Stamps and More challenge #286 – Anything Goes (this one was the easy one as far as creativity went!), Inspire.Create. Challenge #15 – the theme this fortnight was ‘Masculine’ (this challenge set the theme),  CASEing the Catty #172 (this one inspired the layout) and finally Colour INKspiration #30 (this one inspired the colour choice). The Colour INKspiration challenge was by far the toughest for me.  It was a colour combination that although looked amazing in the inspiration photo, I would not normally use. Combined with the fact I don’t own an Island Indigo ink pad.

For CASEing the Catty I cased the card shown on page 41 of the catalogue, shown below. I more or less followed the layout, however I put my sentiment on the bottom.

I started with a piece of watercolour paper that measured 8cm x 8cm. I stamped the mountains and the land in Crumb Cake, stamping off to get some dimension, and using my aqua painter to fill in the colour. The palm trees were stamped in Fresh Fig, I never would have thought to use this colour for palm trees but I actually really like it. The sun is stamped in Pumpkin Pie, again I went over this with my aqua painter. I have noticed that some colours blend (bleed? go watery….I’m not sure what the correct term is here, but stamp on watercolour paper and then go over with a water pen and you will see what I mean) better than others. The fresh fig and pumpkin pie go really well, the crumb cake not so much. For the water, I wet the paper first, and then coloured the water stamp with my Island Indigo Stampin’ Write marker. When I stamped onto the wet paper it gave a really watery image, I then just moved the ink about a bit with my aqua painter. Finally I used my aqua painter to lay down some soft sky ink in the sky area. Making the brush strokes visible was intentional to give the sky some texture.

The sentiment is from Eclectic Expressions – a stamp set I received for free during the now finished Sale-A-Bration. I stamped in versa mark onto basic black card and then heat embossed with white powder.

I added a cherry cobbler mat (9cm x 9cm) behind the image and used dimensionals to pop the whole lot up onto the card base. The card front is covered with a piece of soft sky DSP from the Coffee Break DSP pack.