Dawn Chorus

Hello all... After a quiet start to the month, it's hotting up around here now.  I was over at PaperArtsy last night (I hope you'll check out my Word Tags if you missed them), and today it's a Magpie Day of inspiration over at Country View Challenges.  I wasn't able to be part of the main Simply Scenic inspiration this month, so I'm really happy that I was able to squeeze in a scenic postcard for this.

I've kept it simple with some of my favourite Distress Ink colours and various stamps combined to create a dawn chorus scene.  Did anybody catch the marvellous "slow season" on BBC4?  There was a two hour canal trip, glass-blowing, furniture making and an hour of the dawn chorus - all without soundtrack or voiceover - magical!





Well, this postcard probably qualifies for a similar world of simplicity... some ink, some stamps and some water.

I blended Faded Jeans, Rusty Hinge and Vintage Photo Distress Inks on to a textured postcard, and spritzed water at them with my new T.H. water spray bottle... Yes, I know, I gave in, but looking at this I'm already glad that I did!












The tree silhouettes are formed by the two halves of a Penny Black stamp (used in one of my favourite journalling pages from earlier this year).  It's actually a narrow avenue of trees, but by inking up one half at a time you can have the trees as far apart as you need them!











Along the ground in between I used one of the PaperArtsy Hot Picks birds & grasses images, stamped in a combination of Jet Black Archival and Rusty Hinge, just to get a slightly burnished tone of early morning sunshine on the birds.










The "Postcard" at the top is a Darkroom Door stamp, and I drew the dividing line with a PITT pen.













Another Darkroom Door stamp provides the writing on the postcard, stamped in Faded Jeans so that it would fade into the background.













The words from the Small Talk sticker set seemed about perfect for the theme, and I added shading around them, first of all with Inktense pencils, and then with Faded Jeans and Rusty Hinge Distress Stains, applied with a water brush.








I liked the effect so much I repeated it around the edges of the card to give a bit of extra texture.  So now there are splatters of removed ink and splatters of extra ink.

I thought that was that... but then it occurred to me that I maybe wanted to preserve the colours a bit.  Don't get me wrong, I adore Distress Inks, but over time the colours can fade a little if they're out on display.




So I decided to clear emboss the whole thing.  I tapped the Versamark ink pad all over the postcard and applied the powder, and I love the result.  Not only are the colours more vivid (because of light getting refracted and so intensifying the colour spectrum - or something like that!), but there's a delicious enamelled texture to it.

And of course it catches the light which, as you know, I love as an effect.  Most of the photos in this post are of the plain ink version... just the first and the last photos give you the embossed effect.

So there's my Simply Scenic postcard for you.  I hope you'll hop over to Country View Challenges to check out the Magpie inspiration from the rest of my fabulous team-mates, and I'll see you again soon.

Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.
René Daumal

I'd like to enter this in the Vintage Garden theme over at the new Anything But Cute Challenge.  I hope with the inks, pencils, staining and embossing it's mixed media enough to qualify!
And at A Sprinkle of Imagination it's an Anything Goes theme, as long as you use at least one product available in the store - the Distress Inks and Stains are all there.