Hello everyone and welcome to Monday! Barbara’s back on screen this afternoon with some fabulous Japanese Mini Landscapes stamps, that I’ve had great fun playing with. (I’m writing this post in advance and the stamps are not yet released on the website, so I’ll add the product image and link in once they’ve gone live). I opted to use one of Clarity’s Abstract Layout dies (unfortunately currently out of stock) to create a series of little landscapes, but this would work just as well with the equivalent stencil.

My first step was to cut the layout die into a square of Clarity’s premium card – I cut the card piece slightly larger than the die.

I selected the three largest pieces and stamped the houses from the set onto them in black Archival ink. I then lightly brushed ‘broken china’ Distress Oxide across the clouds mask from the Build a Scene set to create the sky on each pice, then used a waterbrush to add shade the houses with ‘bundled sage’, a pretty yellow-green colour.

I stamped the little trees into the rectangular strips, adding the clouds and ground colour to them in the same way, then shaded the leaves with the ‘rose carmine’ Polychromo pencil. I also used a stencil brush to add the ‘bundled sage’ to the two narrowest rectangular strips, as I didn’t want to leave them white.

I couldn’t find a piece of matching paper that I was happy with for a mount, so solved that by cutting a slightly larger piece of white card and brushing the ‘bundled sage’ around the edges. Once done. I glued the die cut frame onto it and attached it to a 7×7 card blank.

The final stage was to glue all the die cut elements back into place, then add the little cats and sentiment from the stamp sets, together with the little trio of birds from the Just Woodland & Birds set.

These stamps make fabulous little scenes, don’t you think? You can get a detailed look at them on Clarity’s 2pm YouTube show today, together with more inspiration from my design team-mates and Barbara’s demos.

And I’m heading off to share this with a couple of current challenges at Allsorts and Cardz4Galz