Photo of the Day: Best Pictures of December 2011, Gallery - National Geographic

Photo of the Day: Best Pictures of December 2011, Gallery - National Geographic

I just had to share this with you! 

(And how cool that national geographic includes in the galleries blogger buttons for sharing!)

What a beauty! And what a unbelieveable image...!

Ocean inspired envelope

I already made this envelope a few days ago but forgot to post about it. Mh... my neurons are not the newest ones ^^

The picture is from graphics fairy, you can find it here. As soon as I saw it I knew this is perfect for an envelope. Normally all you would need is a colour printer.

This is where my problem started. I just can print in old black and white and not even in a good quality... (Yes, a new printer. Would be great... and needs money... :( ).

So I printed a test version. After this one I decided to add more contrast and brightness to it. Just with the grafic modification options word offers, that's enough for projects like this one :)

Now you have a better chance to paint it after printing. Otherwise the colours would be too dull.

I folded and cut the paper for a very simple envelope :)

Here is the finished envelope shape front:

I wanted the black printed lines to come through so I used artistic water colours.

I also used a black fineliner to overpaint the outlines for more contrast. And I added some movement through more "swirling hair lines"...

All the fishes have some silver as last finish and the mermaid has some gold in the green.

A little bit difficult (as always) to catch on a foto but I hope you get the idea.

After all this was done every creature was overlayed with clear embossing powder.

It is also a little bit difficult to see the effect but it is quite nice. ^^ A little bit like water...!

After all I have to say I am even glad I don't have a colour printer. Otherwise I wouldn't have painted it and in the end I like the mermaid in all this green and gold shades more than the original ^^

Ocean - the first card with the new stamps

The background is a kind of sandwich paper over black cardboard (I took this cardboard out of a prospect for jewelery ^^). I crushed and teared it so the structures could evolve. Afterwards stamping it with a sponge (the one you need for washing the dishes, very hard and scratchy) with stampin ink and acrylic paint.

The rest was just stamping with the newly carved stamps ^^

Here two impressions of the "evolution" of a background:

New stamps - ocean stuff

I registered myself in a new forum (a german one) and they have these challenges or week topics. One was "maritim" and I made some new stamps for it:

a sailing ship, little fish swarm and two kinds of flying sea gulls

I used erasers as carving rubber as most of the time (because it's cheap and everywhere avaiable!) but have to say with this little details it is not really useful. It doesn't carve so nice and easily like the rubber plates made for carving stamps and with little details it is horror...!

But still... I like them!

Raw material (brain energy... the name is great!)

Different companies, different sizes and different consistency!

I always make a lot of test stamping...