Hello crafty friends. I’m back with another sample to show you featuring one of the new birds stamps sets from Clarity – today it’s the turn of the Song Bird. This is another one of their two-way overlay sets, with outline and infill stamps, both of which also work on their own – I’ve just used the outline stamps on this one, with pencil shading.

I started by cutting one of the 6×4.5″ pieces of premium card into a square and stamped the circle outline into the centre with black Archival ink. I then built up the leaves on either side using the small individual stamps.

I couldn’t decide on colours (nothing new there!) so pulled out my Colour Cube Vol 1, and ran my random number generator app which gave me #193, so off I went with my Polychromos. I used ‘may green, ‘permanent green olive’ and ‘pine green’ for the leaves, with ‘pink madder lake’ and ‘violet’ for the bird and flowers. It’s pretty impossible to get colour shading on little floral sprays, but I’ve found if you use two colours and shade the flowers alternately, you get a sense of depth on them.

I was racking my brain for a suitable sentiment and remembered the Let Heaven and Nature Sing set – the smallest of the three was perfect on a topper cut with a nested circle die, which I edged with a purple Sharpie. I then simply sat the main topper on a 5×5 card blank.

I love this little bird singing his heart out! We’ve had a couple more days of sunshine here and I could actually hear birdsong in the garden! We Love Stamping have got ‘wildlife’ as the option on their new challenge, so I’m going to share this with them. I’ve got another sample from the new birds stamps to share tomorrow, as well.