Leftovers

Hello all, great to be here at Artistic Outpost today.  Today I'm sharing a couple of tags which came about pretty much as a side effect of my project for last week's AO Children's Literature bloghop (worth a hop round if you haven't already been - there are some lovely projects from the whole team).

When I was creating my altered Alice book, I started a couple of spare panels on which, rather than just stamping the images onto the book pages, I embossed them with some fine detail black embossing powder.  This gave a really bold, glossy, dimensional look to the images.

I wasn't sure until part way through the process which ones I would go with, so they got partly watercoloured.  But once I'd decided on the plain inked ones (the subtler outlines worked better with the soft, whimsical look the book was developing) I had these two, rather beautiful, embossed, and partly painted images left on my desk.

Well, obviously I couldn't just throw them away, so they became the centre of two simple tags - with their sharp, clean lines they're almost the opposite of the over-the-top layers and layers of the original project! And rather than colour them more naturalistically, I left them with the starker blue and white look.

The backgrounds are painted with Fresco paint in Sky, and then I stamped the gorgeous letter block from the Secretary Pool set using Snowflake (also Fresco).  Between the great clarity of the stamp and the consistency of the Fresco formulation, you get a really great image, even stamping with paint.

I then added the pencil tips - also from Secretary Pool - stamped in Black Archival for super-sharp clarity (somebody's been busy with the pencil sharpener - these look lethal!).

I gave the images a little touch of Fresco too... partly to cover up a smudge which had made its way onto the White Rabbit's haunches while he hung out on my craft desk.  If you look closely, you'll see there's still a slightly pinkish (well Seedless Preserves-ish) hue in places!

Once the images were stuck down, it was a simple matter of matting the tags onto some black cardstock for a nice sharp finish, and I tucked some snippets of cheesecloth into the tops for a touch of whimsicality amongst all the chic sharp edges!

Thanks for dropping by today.  Don't forget there's still time to share your projects with us at this month's Referral Programme for the chance of a prize - just as long as they have at least one Artistic Outpost stamp on.

And be sure to drop in here tomorrow when there's lots of excitement to be had...  Happy Stamping!

Designer: Alison Bomber
Words and Pictures