brusho heart

This flowering baroque heart is the new clear stamp from Chocolate Baroque, and is the latest in a series of heart stamps - all on special offer at the moment!
I had a leftover piece of watercolour card already brusho'ed (if that is a word), so I stamped the image with black versafine and clear embossed it.
The large flowers were bleached out, and I was pleased that all the colour did come out. I added some extra colour to the leaves and the smaller flowers using spectrum noir pencils and a promarker blender pen. The stamens were highlighted with a gold pen.
The base white card blank is a 6"x6", and the dark purple mat matches one of the brusho shades in the bakground piece.



Lesley Wharton has a show on The Craft Channel today at 11.00am, called 'Brusho art with Chocolate Baroque' - should be a fabulous show! The Craft Channel is on Sky 679, or you can watch on your computer, there is supposed to be a catch-up facility if you miss the show........

shepherd's purse

Yesterday  was the Clarity east workshop with Janet Pring at Bawburgh, mainly using the new shepherd's purse stamp set.
This was the first card we made, masking off the central oblong, sponging with distress inks (milled lavender here), then stamping the word stamp with the masking tape still in place to create a background. Two of the stamps stamped over the top in black archival ink, seed pods coloured with pencils and I bleached out the colour on the flowers. Matching pink and green mats, and a fairly quick card to do - especially if you are like me and leave out the wiggly lines that Janet loves to add round the edges!
The following cards were actually done in the afternoon, using my current obsession, brusho - I was delighted to get the email mentioning this, and both Moira and I turned up with our own boxes of little pots, meaning that we got to make a lot more backgrounds than the others - we did share though!

 The one on the right is my version of Janet's sample card  actually, the left one I masked off the centre and added brusho to make the background to the stamp instead of inking as we did with the first card. The right hand one also shows the difference in colour when you blot the first piece of card with a second piece to get two for the price of one, I used the second print to stamp on.
This one I only used the black brusho powder, which gives a lovely muted multicolour effect.






The last two were actually done in the morning, and use a deer stamp and a couple of bullrush stamps from Janet's collection of foliage stamps.
The sample card was coloured with pencils and blending solution after outlining as landscape with a fine liner pen - not my scene at all! I used distress inks and the traditional torn paper to make my landscape, and coloured the bit below the deer stamp to look like water instead of leaving it white for a greeting as Janet had. I also sprayed some water over this bit and blotted it with kitchen roll. I did use the pen to extend the stamp to the side of the card to stop it floating in mid air between the rushes.

I did try the pencil technique - it was far quicker to use inks than pencils - and was not very impressed - probably I didn't use enough pencil in the first place as I couldn't get the blended effect I was aiming for in the sky: it did work a lot better with the water though, where I had used a lot more pencil. I cut this one down to fit a square card, which anchored the deer rather better - some of us did wonder about the designer's artistic licence in having two stags so close to each other and not fighting! Moira reckoned that they had fought and the one on the left had lost...............

more birds....

 had a couple of spare stamped Hobby Art birds from last Saturday - so had a quick play with the brushos.
Top one the birds were coloured with spectrum Noir pencils, which resisted the brushos nicely, just a blue and a yellow shaken on to the card and spritzed. Card blank was 5"x7"
Second one had the same colours, but a heck of a lot of water, and I tried adding dollops of bleach straight onto the wet card. card blank here was 6"sq
Bleach isn't really controllable this way, but I have found out that a lot of the blue brushos don't bleach out very well - this way, they bleached out beautifully, I rather liked the effect of this, even though the bleach and brushos caused some blistering of the card surface, to be honest probably due to too much water....
Am promised a chance to play with these again this afternoon, so there will be more............

thistle butterfly

As soon as I saw the new stamp from Chocolate Baroque I ordered it with the last of my birthday voucher, then waited impatiently for it to arrive.....which it duly did yesterday.
My excuse for playing this afternoon was that it was too hot and sticky to do any more baking - and I wanted to try out more of my new brusho inks as well.I don't have any watercolour paper, and just spraying water on card wasn't working too well as it dried too quickly, so I went for drastic and just held a sheet of card under the cold tap for a few seconds .Adding a very small amount of back ink and blotting with scrunched up kitchen roll produced this background - admittedly it took ages to dry, but I liked the effect.
I stamped the largest image with versafine and clear embossed it once everything was dry, then painted it with very dilute brusho in leaf green and purple. Butterflies were stamped and embossed onto a spare bit of card coloured with scarlet and yellow brusho, then cut out and glued on with gluegel.
Base card was stamped ramdomly round the edges with the large thistle head stamp using milled lavender and dusty concord distress inks, and more dusty concord sponged round the edges. mat is a dark purple card.
Another one for Make my Monday!

CB colour challenge

Chocolate Baroque now have a challenge blog of their own, and the first challenge is a colour one - turquoise, green, yellow and red.
I started out with backgrounds using distress inks on a craft mat, spraying with water and mopping up with card - well, after I had got a yellow ink pad first. I used peeled paint, mustard seed, peacock feathers and fired brick - admittedly not much fired brick!
The briar rose stamp was stamped with versafine across a paler patch of card, then the flowers,leaves and butterflies bleached out - I should really have embossed the stamp first, as the outline suffered a bit from the bleach...............leaves and rose centres coloured with green  promarker and a lot of blender pen, though maybe that should be the other way round as I used the blender first!

Butterflies were stamped and embossed (I do learn!) on a bit of card from a brusho experiment using red and yellow, cut out and decoupaged on top. Mounts are black and turquoise card and the base card is a 7" white square.
I tried a much brighter version using brusho inks in blue and green sprinkled round the edges of another piece of distress inked card - it was originally very similar to the first one. I discovered that brusho is very potent, and that if you add more water to tone down the colour it spreads very quickly.........also had a surprise when I opened the green tub and found it contained orange powder! (but it did come out green when I plucked up the nerve to try it).
The main image after again bleaching was coloured with inktense pencils, butterflies with promarkers and a touch of wink of stella to sparkle them.
By a strange coincidence, butterflies are the theme of Make my Monday this week, so I can enter these for that as well.