Hello crafty friends and welcome to Monday! I’m dropping in with one of the new Mini Landscape stamp sets from Clarity that Barbara & Paul launched this afternoon (catch the show here) – this card uses the Waterside set. Now the clue’s in the title of these stamps – they’re designed for small toppers on cards, which can be less intimidating than trying to make large cards, but I’ve used one of the Clean & Tidy layout stamps to build a little montage of scenes on a slightly larger 6×6 card.

As luck would have it, I found a piece of Antarctica designer paper in my folder that was exactly the right size for the layout stamp – happy days! I stamped the layout with black Archival ink and covered the key sections up with the pre-cut masks that come with the stamps. It was then easy to add three of the little scenic stamps into the larger boxes, removing those masks one at a time. Where the image didn’t quite reach the edge of the box (for example, with the river coming down from the viaduct), I simply extended the line down with a black Micron pen.

Next was to set to work with my Polychromo pencils to add shading to the scenes. I used a selection of greens, blues, greys & browns, but didn’t colour the whole areas in as I wanted to also make use of the pattern on the designer paper. For the moon, I did a couple of things – first I shaded round it with a blue pencil which increases the contrast so that it looks lighter straightaway, but I then also went over it gently with an ink eraser pencil, which helped lift a little of the colour from the paper and lighten the moon.

I added another little scene down in the bottom right hand box, as that area looked a bit empty on reflection, then used several of the other stamps from the set to add the birds and the two chaps at the lake. I stamped two of the sentiments into the bottom box and edged the paper with a black Sharpie – I always use a ruler to do that on paper as I’m afraid of the pen being more likely to slip against the thinner edge than it does with cardstock (and the last thing I want is a black streak across the front of my artwork!). Finally, I embossed a frame onto a 6×6 card blank with a square embedder and a ball tool, then attached my topper to sit inside it.

These images are such fun to play with – they really work for masculine cards (like this one) but also for lots of occasions and general notecards. I’m heading off to share this card with a few challenges, starting with the ‘water’ theme at Inspire.Create. The Male Room are looking for vehicles/transport (check out that little rowing boat!) and my beautiful designer paper background hopefully fits the bill at Love Those Pretty Papers!