Hello everyone – I hope you’re enjoying the weekend. I’ve had a great day filled with crafting inspiration, as I was doing Clarity’s online workshop using a gel plate and alcohol inks. It’s such fun taking part in these live events with Barbara, but the great thing is that the workshop is still available if you missed it (and you get access to it for whenever you need it once you’ve booked, so you can keep coming back to it). We spent the final part of the afternoon finishing off some of the pieces we’d created, so I thought I’d share this one with you using the Build a Landscape stamps which also picks up the tones in AAA Colourful‘s board.

Here’s the original background piece that I created on a piece of 7×7 stencil card using the gel plate and three shades of alcohol inks – ‘denim’, ‘cranberry’ & ‘botanical’.

I chopped it into two and opted to use the lower piece for this card, rotating it so the blue became a river rather than the sky. I added a couple of groves of trees using first and second generation black Archival, then the little dog walker and a couple of ducks in the water (the dog looks like it’s spotted the ducks!) The duck images have legs on them, but that’s no good if they’re in the river so I tore a bit of low tack tape and stamped them along the top of it so their legs were masked off. I also used a torn piece of copy paper to sponge the black ink below the trees and under the ducks to create a ground shadow.

I found a co-ordinating piece of companion paper in the Northern Lights set, layered my topper and attached it to a 5×7 card blank, finishing with one of KISS word stickers.

I’m loving this technique with a gel plate – and I’ve got a good pile of backgrounds from today’s sessions to add to my stash! Clarity’s online workshop is definitely worth checking out for great ways to use a gel plate.