Hello crafty friends and welcome to another dip back into the Claritystamp craft club. These cheeky chimps are from April 2018 and, I have to confess, aren’t just one that I hadn’t used – I’d actively avoided them! They are so far out of my usual comfort zone and style and I did debate just skipping this week in the lookback, however part of this little adventure is to push myself and not just do the same things every week, so here we go!

Thankfully there was a great example from Dee Paramour on the project sheet and so I adapted this card from that. I started with piece of Clarity’s ‘Shenandoah designer card and cut it into a square. I then put one of the ‘Christmas rounds’ leafy stencils on the card and ran it through my embossing machine using a rubber shim, then used a sandpaper block to rub the leaves so they stood out. (Not all stencils are robust enough for this treatment!)

I used a stencil brush to add Distress Oxides in ‘rustic wilderness’ and ‘walnut stain’ over the leaves and then stamped the chimps into the centre. I used two inks for this – I started with black Archival but struggled to get the image really black (think I’m ready for a new ink pad!) so added a layer over the top with ‘black soot’ Distress Oxide. Thank goodness I was using my stamping platform. Once the ink was dry I added some shading around the chimps with a pencil and a Pergamano blending nib.

I mounted the designer card onto a mat of black and then out the whole piece onto a 6×6 card blank. I finished with one of Julie Hickey’s ‘birthday messages’ stamped onto a die cut banner.

I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out. I’m going to share it over at Global Design Project as I used their sketch, and with Love To Scrap a new-to-me challenge hosted by my bloggy friend Leslie, where the theme is ‘anything goes’.