gilded trees

A very quick play with the new Christmas tree tangle stamp from Chocolate Baroque and some gilding flakes that surfaced when I was looking for Halloween stamps!
This version is a tad dramatic, but I think this is going to be my go-to stamp for quick Christmas cards this year - thinking white embossing on blue card........
Am linking this to challenge 31 Moving along with the times - trees or leaves

brusho halloween

Watching Lesley on the Craft Channel last week I saw her demo a different way of using brusho powders, much more controllable but still with all the varied colours - naturally I had to try it out!
Having found a set of Halloween stamps - needless to say not the one I was looking for! - I decided that it would be ideal to try on the skies.
Tags were a nice size, not so much space in which to go wrong but still big enough. The  base tag was cut from white card, and the top from a pale kraft card.
I stamped the images from the nevermore set in black versafine, then added a moon mask. Black brusho powder was sprinkled sparingly over the images. The brusho powder is then activated using a brush and water, sort of splodging a little water on one small area at a time, keep wiping the brush clean as you go before moving to the next bit. You can see where i didn't quite get a smooth transition of colour, but it looked like clouds anyway.
Once dry, I removed the moon mask and coloured the tree, tombstones,  fence and grass with marker pens. I stamped the window from gothic fragments at the top of the second tag and cut out the window shape. More black powder on this piece, more heavily this time, and the same water and brush technique. Once dry, this second part tag was glued over the first one.

same basic technique for the second tag, apart from both tags being cut from the kraft card.
Images this time were stamped with versamark and embossed with lava black EP before adding the moon mask and the black brusho. The top tag was stamped with the same window stamp, but this time at the bottom of the tag using brown ink, and only the actual window cut out. I added some more stones using a marker pen, then used yellow ochre brusho powder to add colour to the stonework.

autumn medley

 The Chocolate Baroque DT theme for this month is autumn or halloween - had to start with autumn as haven't unearthed the halloween stamps yet!
I used the autumn medley stamp, partly because I like it and also because I could find it! (am trying to declutter my craft space, which only seems to create an even worse mess - hopefully only temporary).
My first was an experiment that didn't quite work, stamping and masking the lady then using a gelli plate to create the background - I was trying to get a leafy image using actual leaves, works fine with sponges and inks , but not with a gelli plate and paints. Still, it was an interesting mottled effect, so i used it! The lady was coloured with watercolour pencils, timmed down, matted onto a piece of kraft card that had been embossed with a woodgrain folder and sponged with brown and green inks, Final narrow mat of gold card, base card is A5 kraft card.

Second card I went for a very muted colour scheme, using shades of brown and green pencils. It ended up a little too muted, so Ioverpainted with red and yellow inks using a waterbrush, then highlighted some of the leaves with glossy accents.
Base card is A5 kraft again, with a single gold mat. The 'ribbon' strip down the edge was yellow card randomly stamped with the leaves from the autumn edges set in orange, green and brown, then sponged over with brown ink to tone the yellow down.Cut a thin strip off and added gold card mat.

The tag used up some of the stamping errors, where I managed to smear some of the ink - no way could I hide them, so cut the lady down to tag size.
I coloured leaves with pencils, then fussycut them out. Two sets were glued over the stamped images, the rest just dotted round.
To be honest, this one is my favourite so far.