Hello everyone. I’m kicking off the day with one of my demos from this morning’s show on Clarity Social TV with the fab new Sam’s Christmas Tree set of stamps, drawn by the brilliant Sam Crowe. They’ve worked perfectly with one of the Christmas Quote stamps for our new theme of Q for Quote at Alphabet Challenge.

I started with a piece of card cut to fit on an A6 card blank and stamped the quote into the centre. I added a tree each side from the A5 stamp set, then a second one each side from the A6 set, all with black Archival ink.

I then grabbed my stencil brushes to brush ‘chipped sapphire’ Distress Oxide around the top of the card and ‘speckled egg’ below the trees, keeping away from the centre. I could then shade the trees with my new ‘winter‘ set of Faber Castell polychromo pencils, using ‘earth green’, ‘pine green’, ‘ultramarine’ and ‘violet’. The next step was to doodle the ground line with a micron pen.

I added shadow along the ground line and below the trees with grey polychromo pencils and then highlighted the trees with a fine White Posca pen. I ran round the card edges with a black Sharpie and attached it to an A6 card blank. The final touch was to scatter snow (or stars?) into the sky with a regular white Posca pen.

I hope everyone will love these quirky little trees as much as I do! I was demoing on the table next to Sam Crowe at the Clarity Open Days and it was such fun to watch her in action with these stamps. Check out Sam’s social media for more of her inspiration!

Meanwhile, I’m going to share this with a couple of current challenges. Allsorts are looking for a focal sentiment on our cards and 52 Christmas Card Throwdown want to see stamps used – right up my street!