Welcome to my crafty blog. It’s Sunday so here’s the next in my personal challenge working back though my issues of Clarity’s new design club stamps. This week it’s the labradors from February 2017, who are getting an first outing. I always avoided these kind of stamps in the past, as I found it difficult to colour them. I’m no Royal Academy artist even now, but thanks to the online lessons Barbara Gray hosted in Clarity’s SHAC Shack through lockdown I learned the basic techniques of pencil colouring & feel able to use it on cards.

I started this one with a piece of stencil card trimmed down to fit on a slimline (DL) card blank and stamped the swirly line from the ‘doodleology square’ set across it in black Archival ink.

I masked the line off with a piece of low tack tape (I stamped the image onto it and cut the top edge out) and then stamped the labradors onto it. The next step was to shade the dogs with my Spectrum Noir pencils – I used four different greys, starting with a light background on them and gradually working through darker tones thanks to the guide from Barbara on the project sheet.

I cut a mask for the dogs from a sticky note and then brushed ‘pumice stone’ Distress Oxide across a torn piece of copy paper for the landscape. I added a couple of trees from the ‘wee trees’ stamp set, and popped shading around the bottom of the trunks and under the dogs with the torn paper, ‘pumice stone’ and a sponge.

I finished by adding the sentiment and ran a black marker around the edge of the topper, before attaching it to the card blank.

Thanks for dropping in – I hope you like this little offering. I’m going to share it with a couple of blog challenges that I took inspiration from. The layout is from the current Freshly Made Sketches and I teamed it with the colours from Color Throwdown