Hello crafty friends. I decided to have another play with one of my new stencils from Claritystamp (it’s #22 from the Craft Club back issues) and as a result this is yet another card that has no stamping on it – for someone who is a confirmed stamper at heart I seem to be producing quite a few at the moment without it! Always good to push yourself, I suppose. The starting point for this one is the new challenge from The Paper Players with their theme of ‘winter animals’.

I deiced to continue on my quest to use up more of my large stash of designer papers, so cut a piece of Clarity’s ‘Antarctica’ to fit a 6×6 card blank. I anchored the stencil with some low tack tape and brushed ‘chipped sapphire’ Distress Oxide through it. You’ll see in the photo that there are two versions of this – I did the first one with the darker part of the paper ta the bottom but decided it didn’t look wintery enough so stenciled a second one with it the other way round. (I will use the first one for another card…. eventually!)

I then positioned the ‘deerscape’ mask so two of the deer were stood between the trees, and masked off the rest of the herd with sticky notes. I used a sponge to colour them in with ‘watering can’ Archival ink, and then tore a scrap piece of paper to sponge ink across for the ground under their feet (so they weren’t floating in mid-air!)

I ran a black Sharpie round the edge of the paper to define it. You have to be careful doing this on paper rather than card – it’s very easy for the pen to slip and put a line on your picture (ask me how I know….!!) The whole piece then went on the card blank and I finished with a Clarity word sticker.

Nice and simple. Life’s got a bit busy over the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t really got the brain space to cope with complicated cards!