Gaggle of geese

Hi crafter's

I thought I had better get my entry done for the Claritystamp challenge, August is going very quickly. The theme is animals so I decided to use the geese stamp which I bought in the last Clarity sale. To start I cut some Watercolour paper by Khadi into a tag shape. This paper is made partly from rag and stays soft and pliable after painting. I haven't used my Inktense blocks for a while so I decided to use these to create the background. There are different ways to use them but this time I simply rubbed the flat edge of a dry block over the paper where I wanted the colour to be, The blocks can be used wet as well as dry. What I do is break the blocks in half one for dry work and one for wet, this way you can go from wet to dry easily. I have used a light green for the grass and a combination of yellow, orange and a little bit of red for the sky. Before colouring the top of the tag I punched out a mask for the sun from a post-it note and stuck this down. When satisfied use a flat paint brush and water, brush from side to side. The colours will be bright. Take off the mask and blend the paint over the sun. I then dried the tag with a heat gun. I stamped the geese first with Archival black ink then the grasses 6 on each end, in the middle I turned the grasses stamp upside down and just used the bottom. Ink up the blossom and stamp along the top. When Inktense paint is dry it is permanent so the blossom can be painted over the top with out lifting off the background colour. I used a damp paint brush to take paint directly from the block, do check how strong the colour is before painting though. I mixed together a darker green and used this to ground the geese and grasses. Ink up the bottom two lines of the Count your Garden stamp and place over to the left hand side. Mat on to black card, make a hole and thread with some ribbon.

For the background I used acrylic paints in green and yellow to cover a piece of white card. To add texture I painted white gesso through the Delicate and Dots masks by That Special Touch in opposite corners. I really like creating my own collage backgrounds so with this in mind I got out all my Clarity stamps (quite a lot now) to see what I could use. The inks I have used for the background are Bamboo and Black Memento. First I stamped the NDC cow parsley stamp along the bottom using first and second generation images, then stamped the music score randomly filling in some of the spaces. The flourish from the birdcage set was repeat stamped in the corner, then fill in with the I Heard a Bird stamp.I used other little detail stamps I had in my Clarity collection to fill in and add something where I felt it was needed. Now take the block tile from the letterbox set and ink up in bamboo ink, stamp in the top corner over the gesso. Stamp the G in the box in black ink then stamp the lower case letters to spell geese. Blend bamboo ink around the edges, I also ran a black ink pad along the edge. Attach the background on to a white base card. The tag was then glued on to the base card with Pinflair glue gel. To finish I put two small strips of washi tape on the bottom left hand side.

That's all this time, thanks for looking.

Happy crafting

Sally