TAG ART

Hi all,this is Cuchy
I wanted to share with you how I made this tag (subtitles in Spanish and English). It might inspire you in such way to create your Xmas cards these days.
I used a variation of the salt technique for the background that I hope you like it.
If you want to see more of my work, please visit my blog or my facebook page.
Thanks so much

Collage background

Hello, this is Cuchy.

I made a slide-video that shows how I create a collage background for my ATCs
Hope you find it useful.

If you like my work, you're invited to my blog. Thank you.

Shadow Tutorial

Patricia Garcia has gladly accepted to share with us this neat tutorial using Copics...  and here it goes:

Shadow Tutorial...

Today I have my first attempt to a shadow around the image tutorial, I have gotten several e-mails regarding how I do this technique so here it goes...

The first thing I do is completely finish coloring my image, once that is done I choose my main colors for my shadow in this case it was V99,V95,V91 and my colorless blender(I always like to test my colors on a scrap paper first)

With my darkest color I outline my image not too much at a time that way my color doesn't dry (in this case I started with V99)

Then with my next darkest color I go over the out line of V99 blending a bit (in this case V95)

With my last color I go over both previous colors making my line a bit thicker (My last color was V91)

Finally I go over with with my colorless blender blending all 3 colors (This depends how much color you want to remove) evenly and acquiring the right shade, It's very easy and looks nice on the finished card. Thank You for your sweet comments and any questions feel free to ask, I really hope this Tutorial helped

 

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For more of Patricia's wonderful work, click -->here.

Shaving Cream card background

What do you think? When I first read in a magazine a couple of weeks ago about marbelling using shaving cream I thought the magazine was run by madmen but it actually works out really well. I've since played around with the technique and created an easier way of creating my backgrounds with acrylic paints instead of inks!!

To create –

1. Cover the base of your container with shaving cream and spread it so that it is roughly covering the bottom of the container by at least a centimetre.

2. Squirt paint over the surface of the shaving cream. I used 2 different coloured green but you could easily use more than two colours or even use different contrasting colours like red and green.

3. Use the back of your paint brush and swirl the colours together through the shaving cream until you are happy with the effect you are seeing.

4. Place you card flat on top of the shaving cream mix and gently press the card onto the surface of the mixture. Using both hands, lift the card straight up and place onto a flat surface. Use the scrapper to gently scrape away the excess mixture on your card to reveal a swirly paint effect on your surface, much like marble.

5. Leave to dry thoroughly then use to create your card.

Glad Wrap Effect Cards

Everyone who knows me knows just how much I love playing with mixed media techniques, especially working with paints!! I recently found the idea of applying Glad Wrap to paint to distress and mute its appearance while blog hopping and just had to have a play, I've since changed the technique to suit my own personal style and wanted to share it with you. Here's my completed card -


Requirements –

Acrylic paint, a light and a dark shade and silver
Glad Wrap
Scrap of sequin scrap

1. Cut card to size and coat evenly with your darkest colour. Leave to dry thoroughly.

2. Squirt some of the lighter shade onto your painted piece of card. Don’t worry about being precise and exact as the paint will be moved around with the Glad Wrap.

3. Tear of a piece of Glad Wrap large enough to cover the surface of your card piece and the edges by approximately 5 cm.

4. Scrunch the Glad Wrap onto the surface of the card. At this point any excess paint will gather into the folds of the Glad wrap. Leave to dry thoroughly.

5. Once dry, carefully remove the Glad Wrap. At this stage you will notice that where the paint fell into the folds of the Glad Wrap, the paint is thinner or absent.

6. Using the Sequin scrap and a balled up scrap of Glad wrap, sponge the silver paint over the sequin scrap to create a random patterning.

7. Allow the whole piece to dry thoroughly and then attach your embellishments to finish off your card. I chose to colour in a few stamped images then attached with dimensional foam tape. To create the white area for the stamped image I simply ran a Dry Whiteout tape.

Mixed Media Backgrounds

I absolutely love playing with different mediums and textures to create visually different backgrounds for my cards. This one I manages to create after a series of plays but am very much loving the look of it all!!

You will need –

• Red acrylic paint
• Gel crackle medium
• Light and dark Aqua acrylic paint
• Scrap of bubble wrap
• Red glitter paint or glitter mixed through gel medium
• Flocking (I used an orange)
• Clear transparency or watercolour paper

To create –

Roughly paint a sheet of clear transparency (or acetate sheet as it is sometimes called). It doesn’t need to be perfect as you will be adding to this in future layers. Also, you may prefer to use a heavy watercolour paper, it gives a similar effect but more of a matt finish.

Once dry, add a thick layer of crackle medium and leave until thoroughly dry.

Roughly paint the light aqua paint over the surface, again not being precise or worrying about completely covering the surface. This will add to the effect. Once again, leave to dry completely.Pour some of the dark aqua paint onto a flat surface and dab a section of the bubble wrap into the paint. Blot off any excess then blot randomly over the surface. Leave to dry.Once dry, paint the surface randomly with a glitter based paint. Alternatively you may like to add glitter to some gel medium – this creates exactly the same effect.Finally, while still wet; sprinkle some of the flocking onto different areas of the wet glitter paint randomly. The flocking will adhere to the glitter paint and create an extra dimension to the surface.

Both of these cards have been created using the above technique on clear transparency. For the first I have sewn scraps of patterned paper randomly to the surface of the finished background then torn away the excess.

This last one has been created using watercolour card. As you can see the effect ends up similar but has a more matt finish to it.

Dimensional Snow Card

I've used this technique tonnes of times in my scrapbook pages to grunge them up and love the effect. The best part is how easy it is and of course how effective it looks afterwards.

Required –
· Scraps of Christmas paper (I used Basic Grey), additional scraps such as vintage sheet music.
· Gap Filler (also known as pre-mix wall putty and/or spackle)
· Rubber Stamp (I used a Stampin up jumbo roller featuring snowflakes)
· 3 pigment ink pads (preferably from the same colour family)
· Ink brush
· Other bits to complete the card such as rub on sentiments, snowflake design felt tape.

To do –

Cover a 15” by 15” pre-folded card with strips of patterned papers and/or various ephemera until you are happy with the base. Ink the edges of the card with a cocoa coloured ink pad. (Its important to do this now as its more difficult to add bits of edge colouring later).

Measure out approximately 1 tablespoon of the putty and begin to spread it out along one corner and up along the two sides.

Using the roller stamp, roller into the putty while it is still wet to leave stamped marks in the putty. Put aside to completely dry.

Once dry, put out each of the three ink pads. Begin with the lightest colour and apply ink to the bristles of the brush. Dry brush the ink liberally over the entire area of the putty, pushing some of the ink into the grooves.

Next, using the mid tone coloured ink, again apply ink to the bristles of the brush. This time only lightly dry brush the putty on your card. This second colour should enhance the edges of the grooves to bring them out more.

Finally apply the darkest colour ink to the bristles of the brush and dry brush the edges of the card and across small areas of the card to add shadow and depth to the putty. Leave to dry thoroughly.

Once dry, add the remaining elements to your card to complete.

To see more of Sharon's work you can visit her Blog at http://justmeandthem.typepad.com/

Acetate-based Luminescent Backgrounds

I was recently sent a sheet of the Prima clear paintable sheets and after a lot of thought managed to come up with an effective way of using it, But once gone I actually kind of missed using it so managed to come up with this technique to keep on adding the luminescence to my cards!!

Required –
· Sheet of acetate (I used a sheet of overhead transparency)
· Copic markers (I used various shades of blue)
· Tim Holtz Pearlescent paint daubers (I used Pearl, Light Denim and silver)
· Background stamp or permanent marker
· Stazon Stamp pad – Black

Using the Stazon pad, stamp your background image onto the surface of the acetate sheet. Alternatively, you could use a permanent marker to draw a pattern.

Turn the acetate over and colour sections of your stamped (or drawn) image with the copic markers. Only do sections you would like to highlight such as the centres of the snowflakes.

Turn your acetate over once more to the stamped side. From now on this will be the back of the image. Using the silver paint dauber swipe the paint over the surface of the stamped image.

Using the darker colour paint dauber (in my case the light blue) and daub the paint along the edges of the stamped image in addition to sections of the stamped image you want to darken such as the centres of the snowflakes. This adds to the colour already applied with the markers.

Finally, using the lightest colour (in my case the pearl) fill in the remaining area of the stamped image with light daubing action. Leave to dry then trim and attach to card with a strong glue.

Here's another one I created with this technique but with darker colours -

A note from Julie

WOW fantastic card and a fantastic tutorial ~ Thank you Sharon

I am very pleased to announce that Sharon is going to be an ongoing contributor to this blog so keep checking back :)

For further inspiration go and visit Sharons brilliant Just Me and Them Blog she is one talented lady!

Anywhere Punches Decorative Accents

Here is a really, really easy technique that can look quite nice on the right card or scrapbook page. I recently used this on a card I had in a swap and one of the ladies who received it asked me how it was done so I thought I'd demonstrate it here.

For this technique you will need the following: anywhere hole punch with three or more sized hole punches, a hard surface to punch on, a hammer, a piece of cardstock and a constrasting piece of cardstock or paper, an adhesive eraser, a pencil and eraser, adhesive. You probably have an anywhere hole punch in your tool arsenal from the days when eyelets were all the rage and before there was the Cropadile. My set is from Making Memories and it came with three interchangeable heads in different sizes. You will also probably want to have a tool for poking out the pieces of paper that get into the punch heads. You can use a piercing tool if you have one.

On your cardstock you will need to draw some wavy lines or whatever design you would prefer. Make sure the lines are quite faint because you will want to erase them at the end. Then place your cardstock on a hard surface for punching.

Place your anywhere hole punch near the start of one of the lines. I usually like to start with the smallest punch and then go from there. Use your hammer to tap down hard on the punch and voila!

You have the first hole done.

Line up the hole punch along the line next to the first hole. Make sure they are one or two millimeters apart because the hole will spread slightly when it is punched and you don't want to punch into the existing hole.

Continue along in this manner, varying the size of the hole punch as you "trace over" the line you've drawn. The pattern you lay down is completely up to you - do whatever looks good to you. I tend to not use the same size punch for more than three holes in a row. As you go along remember to periodically clean out the heads of the hole punches or the paper will get compacted up inside them and will be difficult to remove.

When you are finished you will have "drawn" your lines with the hole punches, giving you a nice pattern to use on a card. When you have punched all the holes, you can go back over your pencil lines with an eraser to remove them.

You may be wondering why I don't draw the lines on the back of the card so I don't have to worry about erasing the pencil lines. While you can do this, I personally don't like the look of the punched holes from the back. They tend to bevel a bit and the back isn't as smooth in appearance as the front.

Adhere your punched cardstock over a contrasting piece of paper so the other cardstock shows through the holes and you're done! Some nice ways to use this technique are as stems for flowers or strings for balloons. You can also use it to write out words. You could use just one size of punch for a different look as well.

Here's a simple card I made using this technique.

Supplies: Paper (Bazzill, SU!, My Minds Eye), Ribbon (Offray), Stamps (SU!), Ink (Versa, SU!), Embossing Powder, anywhere hole punch.

A note from Julie

Brilliant Tutorial Lisa Thank you

Go and check out Lisa's Blog HERE to see other lovely creations

If you create something using Lisa's Tutorial please leave a comment with a link so that we can come and see :)