Hello crafty friends. I’ve got another of my Clarity Social TV demos from last Friday to share with you today, as I promised at the time having skipped through this one quite quickly in the 2pm show. The Kite Doodle stamp set is another one hand-drawn by Barbara in the earlier days of the SHAC and I love the intricate detail in it. I decided to team it up with a trio of the Triangle People for a fun scene of kite flying in the park!

The first step was to cut a piece of premium card to fit on a slimline (DL) card blank. I stamped the kite and the family trio onto it using black Archival ink.

I covered the kite and the bows on it’s tail with the precut masks from the stamp set, then cut ones for the triangle people using Clarity’s blank mask material. When doing this, the trick is to stamp the image onto a piece of copy paper, lay the mask material over it (you can see the stamped image through it) and then cut out the shapes. Once the copy paper is peeled off the mask, it’s ready to go on your image – and you still have the original piece of carrier paper to store your bespoke masks on for future use. Anyway, having got my triangle people covered up, I set about making the background. I first created the sky by brushing ‘broken china’ Distress Oxide across the Clouds mask, then switched to the Mountains & Hills mask and ‘rustic wilderness’ for the ground. Once I’d got my ground in place, I could add the trees using the two stamps in the Kite set.

I was then on to the colouring phase. I used a light wash of ‘salty ocean’ Distress Oxide with a waterbrush to add the background colour to the kite, doing the same on the little figures with ‘saltwater taffy’ and the trees with ‘rustic wilderness’. I let the ink dry completely and could then start adding details to the images with my Polychromo pencils. I outlined the trellis on the kite with ‘bluish turquoise’, picking out the leaves on it in ‘permanent green olive’. I thought it looked at little dull at this point, so used a fine white Posca pen to highlight the know in the centre and to add dots at the intersections of the kite’s trellis. I used the ‘permanent green olive’ pencil to add depth to the shading on the trees and to ‘ground’ them and the three figures, before turning to my little trio. First, I ran low tack tape around the edges of the central one and used the leafy swirl from the Kite stamp set to add a pattern to her dress. I could then add shading to the dresses by blending ‘coral’ and ‘light cadmium red’ Polychromos, using the ‘permanent green olive’ for the stem of the leaves.

That’s a lot of details, but actually it’s just a combination of some simple processes. I cut one of Clarity’s 8×8 card blanks in half (leaving the fold at the top) and added the topper straight onto it, finishing with one of the KISS word stickers that I’d edged with a black Sharpie. So that’s a slightly more leisurely look at how this card came together than I managed on Friday afternoon! I was so pleased with how this little scene in the park turned out – don’t you think it looks like a mum and her kids enjoying an afternoon out together? Ready for warm spring and sunny summer days!

I’m going to share with with one of the current blog challenges out there- Cardz 4 Galz are looking for ‘a splash of green’ on our cards, which I managed with my landscape and trees.