Thursday, December 13, 2012

Thursday Theme: Evergreen

Been a little more artsy this week.  Yay!  With an unexpected twist.  See, a couple weeks ago, I had cut a bunch of tags out of plain white watercolor paper with a torn bottom edge, planning to do a lot of white backgrounds with simple motifs.  But... best laid plans of mice.  You know.

Green happened.

More specifically, Iced Spruce, Evergreen Bough, and Pine Needles in the Distress line happened. 

I blame Mom.

But it's okay, because I really didn't know what I was going to do with all my pristine white tags, but then I started playing with Mom's Distress Stains and Perfect Pearls, and the next thing I knew, I had a whole theme for this week.

All of these backgrounds were done using Distress Inks or Stains in various combinations of the above listed colors and Perfect Pearls mists in Heirloom Gold and Biscotti, using the wrinkle-free distress technique, which is my current favorite way to do a background.

Here I used that embossing powder resist technique that I used on the last acorn tag.

I used the Fabulous Flourish stamp from Hero Arts.

Even with the embossing powder melted off, you can see where the ink pooled in the curls.  I love it.

This one shows more blue than green, but I promise, it's the same inks.

I also had some fun with my Michelle Ward stencils and some gold Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic.
 
This is actually a monoprint off of the Maltese Small stencil after using it on another ATC.


And since green makes me think of trees, and Winter makes me think of evergreen trees, I played with some tree motifs, too.

Tim Holtz tissue tape gives me my strong vertical here.  The trees were cut out with a new Tim Holtz die that does a pine tree border...

...and I coated them with embossing ink and used copper embossing powder on them.  Look how the torn edge soaked up that ink.  Yum.

I decided that rather than let the back be messy, I'd just ink that, too.

Finally, a new insert for my clear iPhone case.  Just the Iced Spruce ink and Biscotti Perfect Pearls for the background, with Tim Holtz stamps and tissue tape.
 
So much for my white backrounds.  Although I do have one project in mind that will be all white backgrounds.  But green really has caught hold of me this year.  Is there a particular color that you find yourself using predominantly this year?

3 comments:

B said...

All good stuff!

Maryanne said...

It's always the mother's fault :)! I love your evergreen work! And the tag with the monoprint is gorgeous!! Love them all!

Diana Taylor said...

How lucky to have a mum with such fabulous supplies! Green is not a colour I ever choose to work with normally, but you have wowed me with your beautiful tags and I just want to reach out for the green inks! I don't know how you achieve such beautiful backgrounds - they really are stunning. Have a wonderfully creative Christmas!