Welcome to my crafty blog. General masculine cards always seem a bit more difficult to make, and I decided to turn the Claritystamp ‘doodleology’ large mixed texture stamp into a landscape after seeing something similar on social media.

I started by stamping the image onto a piece of white card. I always use my stamping platform for these large stamps, as I find it difficult to get a clear image first time. True to form, it took a couple of goes to get the black outline clearly stamped with Archival ‘jet black’.

I then used my Distress Oxide inks and a water brush to colour in the landscape, using shades of green in the lower part of the card, and blue for the top. As I only have a few colours in the Distress Oxides, I blended them on my craft mat to increase the range of shades. I used ‘mowed lawn’, ‘bundled sage’, mermaid lagoon’ and ‘speckled egg’, adding ‘chipped sapphire’ to each of them for additional tones. I spritzed the ink on the mat with water when I was finished and mopped it up with a piece of stencil card, to create a background I can use in future.

Once it was dry, I trimmed the image down to fit on a 5×7 card blank. I stamped the ‘happy birthday’ from the ‘art nouveau sentiments’ onto a spare piece of white card, trimmed it down and cut the end into a banner shape, before attaching it to the card front with foam pads.

This was a very relaxing card to make, just sitting and shading the doodle shapes. I’ll probably have another go at it, maybe using different inks and tones.