Winter Sunlight

Hello all - I'm so glad you enjoyed my frosted falling leaves over at A Vintage Journey.

We're even more wintry here today with another quick catch up for my PaperArtsy word stamps launch samples, as we've made it back round for another sample using EAB05 The Winter Edition.

This one started with a real collision of words and picture. I'd just been finalising the plates, so had the quotes going around in my head, when Pinterest dropped this photo into my email inbox.  It seemed to me to be a match made in heaven for this glorious quote.

Initially, I was thinking of trying to re-create the photo in mixed media form but then I thought, "well, I don't work with photos very often, but plenty of people do... what a useful opportunity to show that the quotes can work for that kind of scrapping too".

So I printed the photo out and set about trying to create a setting for it which wouldn't let it down but, on the other hand, which wouldn't overwhelm it.  (I see now that maybe there's a reason I don't do this very often!)

Influenced partly by the words, I guess, I reached for the White Fire Fresco paint.  PaperArtsy have excellent metallic shades, as well as a Metallic Glaze which you can add to any of their paints, but White Fire is out and out my all time favourite metallic paint.  (It's my favourite colour of Treasure Gold too - no surprises there.)












I brayered the paint onto some Smoothy card and was immediately delighted with the subtle lustre.













Over that, I stamped the fabulous twigs from Hot Picks 1008 multiple times to give me the woodland atmosphere.













And there are lots of fine twiggy branches in the picture too, of course.













One of the things I really love in the photo is the sense of movement from the snow in the air, and I wanted to try to echo that.  I used a palette knife to apply texture paste through a splatter stencil (I think it was glossy transparent paste but it's tough to remember exactly this long after making it.)












While the paste was still wet, I sprinkled Rock Candy Dry Glitter over it, and then let the whole thing dry and set.












Trying to match that extraordinarily lovely blue of the shadows in the photo wasn't as hard as I thought at first.

It turned out that Fresco Blueberry was just in the right tonal range, so I painted a couple of coats (it's translucent so you need that for coverage) onto some more Smoothy paper.














That served as both the frame in the matted layers and as the plaque for Thoreau's words.















I stamped the quote in Versamark and used the Ranger Liquid Platinum embossing powder on it. 













I love that these stamps are so well made - firm rubber, deeply carved - that you can emboss them and still have a sharp finish on what are really very small letters, especially when you get to the author's name.

I also love how you get that fabulous fiery gleam when the words catch the light.









Finally there's some Blueberry splatter amidst the snow to tie things together.

So a bit of a hop out of kin for me... photos AND glitter... who knew?!  Not the kind of thing you see very often round here, but I was aiming to show another side to these word stamps... I want to share the inspiration they give me as widely as possible!

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  We've one final round of samples to get through -one Music and Silence, one Autumn Edition and one Winter Edition left to go - and those posts will make their way to you as and when there's time and space!  For now, happy crafting all, and I'll see you soon.





The colour of springtime is in the flowers, the colour of winter is in the imagination.
Ward Elliot Hour