Hello friends.  Bit of a busy day today with the new Timescape Creations stamps by Janice Phillips showcasing on Clarity Social TV at 10am & 2pm, plus a new theme at Alphabet Challenge!  Caz has given us V for Vintage this time round – the 5×7 postcard created from Janice’s magpie on a telegraph pole photo made me think of those 1950s film posters and I added vintage style colours into the background.

I started by masking off the border of the postcard with strips of Clarity’s mask material – I chose that over low tack tape as it’s waterproof but, as you’ll see, things didn’t go exactly to plan! I also cut a little mask for the magpie by laying a bit of low tack tape over the bird, tracing the outline onto the tape and then overlaying a little piece of mask material over that to cut it out. Having got the border & bird masked off, I smooshed ‘walnut stain’ Distresss Oxide onto my craft mat, spritzed it with water and blotted the lower part of the postcard into it.

I repeated the process with ‘dried marigold’ into the centre of the card and ‘uncharted mariner’ towards the top – the colours look much paler than if I’d added the ink directly as I sprayed them quite heavily on my craft mat, so they’re diluted. You’ll see from the postcard that I obviously hadn’t pressed the mask material down hard enough on the border to seal it and so the ink bled underneath, but I decided that I quite like the effect!

I wanted to leave the background as the main focus, emphasising the graphic style of the image, so simply added a mount of black card and attached it to an 8×8 kraft card blank that I’d chopped down to match the dimensions of the postcard. The final touch was a Pink Gray sticker – the old poem about magpies is ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’ and this chap looks like he’s waiting for his mate!

Janice really has taken some amazing images and it’s fantastic to now have them as stamps and postcards. I’m not going to leave this fab magpie perched here alone, though – he’s off to find some friends in the Triple B gallery!