Who better to join in sharing some fabulous inspiration for our portion of the Lawnscaping Fall Blog Hop challenge than the talented artist who introduced me to these fun challenges!! Today I am so very excited to share the beautiful work of Jean Manis with you! It was about a year and a half ago when I first met Jean at a school related function, little did I know at that time what an avid paper crafter she was. Over the past short months I have had the pleasure of getting to know Jean better as she stops in here at our office/warehouse. It was during one of those visits that she shared how much she enjoyed the Lawnscaping challenges.
Jean is on both the Simple Scrapper and the Neat and Tangled Design Teams and she shares more of her gorgeous work on her blog Right as Rain. I would like to invite you to head over to Jean's blog to be inspired and leave some comments for her!
Being Jean does not have ready access to her in-box this weekend please join me in welcoming Jean here in the CLASSroom by leaving a comment for her here on this post! You will have until midnight October 7, 2012 Pacific Daylight Time to share your thoughts and be included in our random drawing for some of the fun products Jean used to create this fabulous fall forest for the Lawnscaping Fall Blog Hop Challenge!
Head to the bottom of this post to find the comments section!
Fall in the Pacific Northwest is glorious as the deciduous trees show their color against an evergreen backdrop. I wanted to capture the Pacific Northwest fall, specifically the textures and colors, in a card using a combination of Lawn Fawn stamp sets, a couple of which are intended for the winter and holidays. As soon as I saw the “Let It Snow” set, I knew it was a must-have given its combination of solid and open evergreen trees. Several of the patterned papers from the Basic Grey “Aspen Frost” pad and Echo Park’s “Everyday Eclectic” offer texture with their prints. We are often wearing scarves here, (not just in the winter!), so I donned the “Winter Owl” with a fall-colored scarf, paper-pieced with a print from “Aspen Frost.”
With each card I make I set out to make an improvement in some way – try a new design, try a new technique or polish my stamping or card-making skills. To that end, I have two tips to share.
To “season” the solid trees in the Lawn Fawn “Let It Snow” set, I used a sanding block from Lucky Squirrel.
Stamped with black Ranger Archival ink, you can see that my first tree (on the far right) has some splotches. I sanded the stamp, on the stamping block, lightly and then stamped again (middle image). I wanted to err on the side of under-sanding rather than over sanding. Since I still had a little bit of splotch, I sanded a bit more and finally achieved a clean solid image (on the far left).
I clear-embossed the owl stamped with Versafine black ink. I find that having the embossed edge makes my paper-piecing easier. There’s something about that raised barrier. I stamped and embossed the owl several times, using the owl stamped on Memory Box Vanilla Bean cardstock as the base. Another tip I wanted to share, which I learned from Chari Moss http://www.mossymade.com/, is to use a marker on the edges of cut stamped pieces. This tip was especially useful when I cut out the owl’s eyes, since I didn’t want there to be any white paper outside of the stamped image. Holding the cut paper with tweezers, due to its size, I went around the edge with a Memento marker. It’s best to dedicate a marker to this task as the fibers of the marker will eventually get paper cuts that could lead to bleeding when you use the marker to color.
I stamped the solid trees from the “Let It Snow” set for the forest foreground using “Peeled Paint” and “Forest Moss” Distress inks. These inks paired nicely together color-wise and provide a watercolor-like effect when stamped with the solid tree. I wanted the forest to have a natural feel to it. Three fussy-cut trees sit in the foreground of my scene. I stamped the background forest with the open trees in the set using the same two ink colors. I wanted there to be some overlap to create a cluster. The tallest cut tree was adhered directly to the background; I used 1/16” 3-D dots for the other two solid trees. I used 1/8” 3-D dots to adhere the owl and stapled the banner for a metallic accent.
Going back to my card-making goals, I periodically like to try a different approach. In this case, the “Winter Owl” stamp was one that I wanted to try Copic coloring. This owl uses brown Versafine ink, rather than black, and is clear embossed. I’m a novice when it comes to using my Copics, so my owl doesn’t include any shading. The Copic-colored approach was definitely less time-consuming than the paper-pieced one. Using the colorless blender, I “added” polka dots to the scarf.
