We are thrilled to welcome Taniesa Vlasak to The CLASSroom today! We have been lucky enough to get to know Taniesa a little better this fall as she is not only part of the Honey Bee design team but she is also one of our local customers! She is so kind, so sweet and so crazy talented! Taniesa's cards are filled with gorgeous details and today she has some tips about how to create masks that last!
You can learn more about Taniesa on her blog The Crafty Pickle and you can also find her at the Honey Bee Stamps blog. Please help us show some love to Taniesa to thank her for sharing her creativity with us here in the CLASSroom! Head over to her blog The Crafty Pickle and leave Taniesa a comment before November 19th for a chance to win a $50 coupon to use in our store!
Thank you Taniesa for sharing your talent with us!
I love creating cards and I really love the look of masking. However mass producing a card with masking can be time challenging. Normally you can only use a mask a few times before the ink seeps through the paper and creates a mess. I needed to make several Christmas cards and I knew that I wanted to mix up the sentiment and the coloring medium but keep the design the same. I wanted to be sure ink would not seep through the masks and I did not want to cut a bunch of masking paper. I saw some leftover packaging from my new Honey Bee Stamps dies and stamps I had just received so it hit me…plastic! Take a look at my tip for creating some multiple use masks!
And look… here is a photo of my grid paper from my MISTI stamping tool and my used mask!
This is the backside of both the MISTI grid paper and the large mask. You can see where the ink seeped through the grid paper compared to the mask. You can see some ink on the mask but not much and this is after about 10 cards.
And here are my masks front and back after i finished stamping 18 cards! Now these obviously won't last forever but I could definitely stamp more with these if I wanted to.
For my poinsettia cards I switched up the sentiments using the Honey Bee Stamps Merry and Joy sentiment builder set. Half of them said Wishing you... and the other half said Merry Christmas (and on this design I used the matching die set as well).
Some I colored with Daniel Smith Watercolors like you see here:
And others I used my Derwent Inktense Pencils like the one here:
I love them both. The ones that I used with Inktense Pencils were great because I could scribble the color in and then when watching TV with my family I could be in the room with just my water brush to smooth out the color. Made for very quick coloring. You can see in the photo below what some of the image looks like before I apply water and what it looks like after.
The Inktense colors I used are pictured below. I do have the full set and I can tell you this is one of my most used and most loved coloring mediums (my Daniel smith watercolors being a very close second).
Here is my finished card using the inktense pencils:
I hope my little tip can help you get more mileage out of your masks! -Taniesa
Check out more amazing projects by Taniesa and head to her blog The Crafty Pickle to learn more!