Welcome to my latest Design Team post Visible Image. My creative juices have been a bit stagnant the past couple of weeks as I’ve been suffering with a nasty cold that properly floored me. The weather hasn’t cheered me up any either as we’ve had so many storms and seeming endless rain so, I decided to turn that negative into a positive and use the rain as the inspiration for my cards this week. I used the 'Sparkle In The Rain' stamp set and 'Heavy Rain' stencil.

Tutorial

To begin, I made background panels for DL sized cards using watercolour paper and various Distress Inks. I wanted to try a couple of different colour schemes and blended Pumice Stone for the clouds/ground on both and Weathered Wood, Stormy Skies, Faded Jeans and Chipped Sapphire for the blue panel and Victorian Velvet, Seedless Preserves and Dusty Concord for the purple one.

Next, using the Heavy Rain stencil and a damp cloth, I lifted some of the colour from each panel. Some of the water seeped underneath which produced larger bleached areas but that was no problem.

For additional background texture, I used the darkest of each of the colours to repeat stamp the rain before adding the puddles using grey ink.

For the silhouette stamping, I used my Misti stamping platform as I wanted to get a good impression. The watercolour paper is slightly textured so it needed several goes to get a totally solid silhouette. I also stamped and heat embossed the sentiment using Wow! Platinum Embossing Glitter but it didn’t really show up so I altered that later on.

At this point, I thought the sky looked a bit bare so I used the sentiment stamp with the darkest Distress Ink pads and stamped randomly and off the edge of the panel. Once the silhouette ink was totally dry (test by adding some embossing powder to the panel; if it sticks, wipe away with a dry brush and leave to dry some more) I used an anti-static bag liberally over the silhouette and then smooshed Versamark ink through the stencil, added clear embossing powder and heat set. This process was repeated on the bottom half of the card. I then used the rain stamp and clear heat-embossed that.

For the blue panel, I just used the rain and puddles stamps and clear heat-embossed.

The last job was to redo the sentiment. I wanted to use sparkly embossing glitter so that it reflected the meaning of the sentiment so tried it out on black card where it showed up really well. To keep the grungy feel of the cards, I cut the sentiments out with deliberate wonky angles and attached them using thin foam tape. Each panel was mounted on a black mat then onto a DL card blank.

I love the finished look of peering through a rain-soaked window at a girl in her boots having fun in the rain!

Lorraine

SHOP NOW