Marianne has let the "cat out of the bag," so to speak. It is with a slight bit of apprehension and a great deal of excitement that I will be visiting the Copic booth #4147 at CHA this next week. It appears that they will have a preview of an upcoming video on display at their booth and guess who it features? Yes, you guessed it - it's me. I feel so privileged to have been invited by Copic to share my passion for their product and for airbrushing! Please be gentle on your reviews - LOL! This is the first time I have filmed anything and needless to say I am definitely not an expert in making "movies," but I am passionate about this product and about teaching and so I sincerely hope that you will learn something new and helpful from this upcoming DVD. The video crew from PushPlayPro were fabulous to work with and helped me feel comfortable with the whole "process." My understanding is that this video should be released in the last half of 2009 and that this is a preview only.
What could be sweeter than "sweets" for Valentines? This little treasure of an image is SO easy to work with - it is from this year's Memory Box Valentine collection and is called Cake Stand. Not only does it work for Valentines, but it would also make a cute Bridal Shower or Wedding image.
As with many of my projects I decided to do a little experimenting to figure out what new look I could achieve. I began by inking the cake stand first with Dazzle Champagne. Having recently received the reinkers for these pads I have reinked my stamp pad and I am pleased to tell you that the result is much better than it was after using my pad a number of times. I had noticed that the bling had subsided greatly and so I am extremely pleased to see that using the reinker on the pad brought it back to life again. This is not where my experiment ends though. In the past I have used dye ink pads to emboss simply by first inking my stamp with VersaMark and then inking it with the dye ink. So I decided to try it by combining VersaMark Dazzle Champagne together with Memento Chocolate Chip - YUM!!! I topped this off with clear embossing powder and then heat set it.
If you try this technique I would like to make certain that you only lightly tap your "dazzled" stamp on to your Memento pad being you do not want to transfer all that bling to your otherwise pristine pad. If you do happen to get some transfer I typically will just use a clean paper towel to remove it and then add a little reinker to my pad following the clean-up. It's amazing what a "beating" my pads can take and still work as intended, but I always work quickly to clean up afterwards - not letting it sit and settle in for too long. The pad shown above has not been cleaned, so you can see that a little "bling" does transfer, but most is left on the stamp image as shown on the right.
I then added color to the flowers and leaves, as well as a little to the cake itself using Copic Markers. I whitened the cake a little with my Prismacolor white color pencil. Next I felt that my notecard needed just a hint of distressing being the papers I was working with had that feel. So I used my blending tool together with Adirondack Watermelon to distress the Cotton Candy notecard.
I'm not certain that you can see the bling in the cake stand, but being I know what I am looking for I can see the mica flecks from the Dazzle pad. The cake was begging for a lovely coating and so I applied glue using my 2-way glue pen and added Diamond Dust for a finishing touch.
I thought I would once again share my "tweezer tip" for tying ribbon. I am ALL thumbs and until my friend Taresa showed me this I would always struggle - now I can even tie bows Ü
Using some of the new Bittersweet paper, together with the new Memory Box Sugardrop, to add layers and scalloped pieces to accent the base of the cake stand pulling it all together.
Finally to complete this little card I inked my heart and kissed it with Paisley to remove some of the ink. I find that this technique works best when using a Pigment or Chalk based ink to stamp your main solid image, dye inks haven't given me as crisp a definition as the pigment inks.
I stamped this beautiful heart print on the interior, along with the sentiment, "hope your valentines is sweet! So get your sweet treats ready, Valentines is right around the corner.
