Welcome to my crafty blog. I’ve been playing with masks again today (and not the facial type!) My new ‘city skylines’ masks from Claritystamp arrived last week and I wanted to do some more cards using the ‘riverside landscape reflection’ set as well, so you’ve got a two-for-one offer today on this little blog.

Let’s start with the card on the left, which uses one of the riverside masks. I took a piece of the ‘Antarctica’ designer card and trimmed it slightly to fit on a 5×7 card blank. I used the ‘riverside bank’ mask and sponged ‘watering can’ Archival ink through it to create the landscape. I wanted to get the effect of an evening sunset through the trees.

I used the reflection mask and ‘shadow grey’ Archival to pick up the base of the trees in the water, and then stamped the woman and dog using black Archival.

That little dog really looks like he’s spotted something, so I added the ducks using the ‘extras’ mask from the riverside set, with one stood on the bank in defiance of the dog! I used a micron pen to give the effect of ripples in the water around the ducks that are swimming.

I finished the card by stamping the sentiment in black Archival and edging the topper with a black Sharpie pen, before attaching it to the card blank. This one made me think of my sister who’s got a black labrador – hoping I will get to see her sometime in the next few months, as it’s been far too long thanks to Covid.

I’m going to share this card with a couple of this week’s challenges – Time Out‘s theme is ‘pets’ and TGIF have gone for ‘cats and dogs’

For the second card, I used the top half of the London skyline mask and laid it across the bottom of a piece of white card that I’d again trimmed to fit on a 5×7 card blank. One of the brilliant things about this mask are the little inset pieces that create the inner part of the London Eye, Tower Bridge, and the clock face on Big Ben. I then used a sponge to drag black Archival ink down through the image.

I then swapped the two halves of the mask over, to cover up the skyline as I didn’t want to smudge the ink. I left the little circle in place on Big Ben as I didn’t want to colour that. I first brushed ‘dried marigold’ Distress Oxide across the lower part of the sky, before using the clouds mask and ‘chipped sapphire’ to add the rest. I was again going for an evening sky.

I finished this one by stamping the sentiment in black and then once again running a black Sharpie around the edge before popping it onto a 5×7 card blank.

I’m going to share this card over at Addicted to CAS where this week’s theme is ‘sky’