Starry, starry night

Hello all, and welcome!  Another quick sample post for you today, catching up with some of the ATC gift envelopes I created to show off my latest quote stamp releases with PaperArtsy.  In between, there have been some lightly dancing art journalling pages using one of the quotes from EAB19 Life & Living, but today I'm here with a couple of quotes from EAB20 Night & Day.

This pair of not-quite-ATCs are created on some very cheap cash envelopes.  You can usually pick up packs of 200 or so in a pound shop.  That means that, as long as you keep the top flap open and operational, you can use them for gift vouchers or cash gifts with a little bit of artwork attached.







There's lots of embossing powder involved here - both for the quotes themselves, but also on the background stamping, which is clear-embossed for that fabulous light-catching quality.












They started very simply with some gesso scraped onto the envelopes pretty randomly.  Rather than the 3.5 x 2.5 inch ATC standard, they're actually 4 x 2 and three quarter inches, if you don't count the flap.













Then I added Fresco paints in shades of night blue... Blueberry, Midnight, Twilight and Sky.  There may have been a bit of Purple Rain involved too.














I added the paint in watery washes and spritzed with more water to let it move on the surface, and finished by splattering with whatever was leftover on the craft mat.








Seth Apter's fabulous minis make wonderful "orbits" or rings like the rings around Saturn... the perfect framing for the dimensional white stars. 

The minis are stamped in Cobalt Archival and then clear-embossed, as I said.  This means they have that now-you-see-it, now-you-don't quality which always makes me happy.

The stars are moulded using one of the Finnabair/Prima silicone moulds and some paper clay.  Then, so that they would match the quotes in gleaming whiteness, I pressed them down into the squidgy embossing ink pad, and embossed them with Wow Bright White.







And yes, that's what I used for the words too.  As always, I stamped in Archival ink, so that you get a sharper stamping edge than with (squidgy) embossing pads.













This is really important when you're embossing fine-detail stamps like these words, if you want to be able to read them clearly in the end.  Given one of the quotes is by Vincent van Gogh, I really had to call the pair, "Starry, starry night"!











The white thread adds movement and interest, almost making the stars into shooting stars leaving trails across the sky.

And I really like the kraft framing you get from the cash envelopes as the substrate.







So there you go... a couple of mixed media ATC envelopes celebrating the stars and how we endure even the darkest nights.  Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I hope your weekend will be wonderful, and I'll see you again soon.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'd like to enter this at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge where the theme this week is Shoot for the Stars