Welcome to my crafty blog. I’ve been playing with Claritystamp’s masks again today – they are fantastic for building scenes. Today’s card uses the ‘deerscape’ mask, along with the mountains from the new ‘riverside landscape & reflection’ set – and only 3 ink colours (I do love a bit of blending!)

The three colours are from the current challenge at Fab Friday and the deer were perfect for the ‘Z is for Zoology’ theme from Alphabet

I started by popping the outer mask for the ‘deerscape’ grassy mound onto a piece of stencil card and brushed ‘peeled paint’ Distress Ink across it.

I then used the deer outline mask, lining it up with the top of the grass (there’s a helpful grass line on the mask to make this easier), and blended ‘shadow grey’ Archival ink into the deer.

The next step was to cover up the deer and the grass with the inner masks. I then used the mountains from the new ‘riverside landscape & reflection’ set to put a skyline in behind the deer. I started with the upper line of mountains, brushing ‘faded jeans’ Distress ink across the mask and then blending ‘shadow grey’ into it with a sponge to darken them. I repeated this with the lower mountain line, this time adding more grey to the blue.

The final stage was to mask off the upper mountains, add one of the moon masks and then brush ‘faded jeans’ into the sky. Once done, I lifted the moon mask off and blended a little grey across it to soften the white. I removed all the other masks and then re-positioned the outer grassy one, so that I could add some grey shadow underneath the deer.

I finished by trimming the card down to fit on a 7×7 card blank, and ran a black Posca pen around the edges before attaching it. I haven’t put a sentiment on this one, as I’m not sure who’ll be getting this one.

And just in case you were wondering, you won’t find any deer looking like this in the UK (and that’s not anything to do with my creative skills…!) I thought there was a species of grey deer so looked them up – indeed there are, as roe deer will turn grey during the winter. However, these little guys are actually red deer (from their antlers), so you’ll just have to forgive my artistic licence!