Hello crafty friends! I’m back with another double design team card, starting with our ‘make your mark’ theme at Addicted to Stamps & More, where we’re looking for you to use anything that can make a mark like alcohol markers, coloured pencils, paint, stencilling, chalk, and so on. I went with my favourite Polychromo pencils on the Little SHAC Birds stamps (this is also a DT card for Clarity, with Barbara featuring these fab stamps on today’s HobbyMaker TV shows from 1pm), teaming them up with one of the Celebration Sentiments curved stamps.

So, having cut a piece of premium card to fit on an A6 card blank, I stamped the leafy branch and the smaller birds with black Archival ink, then masked them off with the pre-cut reusable masks that come with the stamps (one of my favourite things about Clarity products). I could then brush ‘speckled egg’ Distress Oxide into the background to soften the white card.

Next was to shade in the images with my Polychromos. I mentioned a while back that my son & his partner had gifted me the full set of four Colour Cube volumes for Christmas and, having used several from Vol 1 over the last few months, I’ve switched to Vol 2 (I worked out that I could use each volume for three months and will have put all four into action over the course of the year – and can then start again!) Anyway, with the help of my random number generator app, I wound up with card 365 and lots of blue tones, so off I went, shading the birds & leaves with ‘cobalt green’, ‘bluish turquiose’ and Pencil A4 from my Perga Liners pencils (it’s a lovely navy shade). I smoothed out the colours with a dry blending nib, then used a Perga Colour pen (#28) to dot in the berries.

I took one of the Celebration Sentiments stamps and stretched it out so it arched nicely over my little birds (this is easy to do on one of Clarity’s Mega Mounts and the stamp will ping back to it’s original shape once lifted off the mount) then stamped it with black Archival ink. To finish, I simply edged the topper with a black Sharpie and attached it to the A6 card blank.

I’ve said it before, but I just love the attitude of these little birds – they’re such fun images! We’d love to see you in our gallery at ATSM – how will you ‘make your mark’ on your crafty creations?

I’m heading off to share these little chaps with the challenges at Word Power and Make My Monday, who’s current theme is ‘birds and/or eggs’.