Watercolour lotus

Yesterday I felt like having a good old play with my Distress Inks and some water, inspired by lots of things I saw on various card challenges over the weekend. So I armed myself with a brush, some water and a bunch of blue Tim Holtz distress inks. I started by a layer of smooshing, letting it dry, and then adding several layers of splattering and splashing. Yes, I know, that's a very detailed and easy to follow description of the creative process. I had a lot of fun, and I think the background turned out quite nice, even if I do say so myself.

I didn't want to detract from the background, so I just stamped the lotus blossom from the gorgeous Lotus Love stamp set from Dee's Artsy Impressions at STAMPlorations and heat embossed in white. I used my new thanks die from Lawn Fawn to create the sentiment. You can't really see it, but both I coloured both the lotus and the sentiment with my Wink of Stella pen, so in real life they have a gorgeous subtle shimmer to them. 

It's really hard to make the Wink of Stella show on photos...

I'm was inspired by, and linking up with, the following challenges:
Just Us Girls - colour inspiration (see below)
The Friday Mashup - Feeling Blue (see below)
The ABC Challenge - Z is for zero (no embellishments allowed)

Card: 190 gsm watercolour paper, 300 gsm textured white card, scrap of dark blue card
Stamps: STAMPlorations Lotus Love
Ink: Tsukineko Versamark, Tim Holtz Distress Inks Blueprint Sketch, Broken China, Chipped Sapphire and Tumbled Glass
Other: Lawn Fawn Stitched Rectangles and Scripty Thanks dies, Papermania Seafoam white embossing powder, Wink of Stella glitter pen

A little bit of shabby grunge

This card is so not my style at all. I'm very much a CAS type of cardmaker, at least most of the time. But when I saw the amazingly beautiful inspiration card by Julee Tillman over at Viva La Verve Sketch challenge I wanted to recreate something similar. It's nice to go outside your comfort zone from time to time and try different things. I used the colours for that challenge as well, although again they are far from my usual colour palette. Which is great as it allowed me to use up some cardstock that I haven't used before. 

I embossed the blue panel using a Tim Holtz embossing folder. I used a pair of scissors to distress the edges and some sandpaper to distress the Core'dinations cardstock which reveals a lighter shade when distressed. I inked the embossed and distressed panel with orange, yellow and brown ink. I die cut the stars and inked the edges with brown ink and distressed using scissors. I did the same for the sentiment banner and the background panel. The sentiment is from one of my most used sentiment sets, the Paper Smooches Sentiment sampler. I think this card would work well as a male birthday card.

Cardstock: Craft UK kraft card, Tim Holtz Core'dination card in Spiced Marmelade, Mustard Seed and Tumbled Glass

Ink: Tim Holtz distress ink Spiced Marmelade, Mustard Seed and Walnut Stain

Stamps: Paper Smooches Sentiment Sampler

Other: Xcut star dies, Tim Holtz embossing folder Retro Circles