Quoth the Raven

Hello everyone, lovely to have your company here at Words and Pictures.  It's Tuesday: time for a new challenge at Fun With ATCs, and our theme for this fortnight is Gothic.  There's lots of inspiration from my fabulous team mates, so get your spook on and come and play along!

I've kept it quite simple this week, allowing this wonderful Crafty Individuals stamp to do most of the work.  It's a fabulous Edgar Allan Poe-ish image - I just love the looming tower, the dynamic raven, and the barbed wire criss-crossing it.

What's also great about it is that it's just marginally larger than ATC sized (2.5 x 3.5 inches is what we're looking for) so I was able to mount it onto thick chipboard and fold the borders of the image over to decorate the edges too.










I stamped in Versamark Watermark ink, and then embossed with Stampendous Fine Detail black embossing powder.  

I'm incredibly impressed with the "fine detail" achieved with the powder - it really is a very detailed image, and the powder has captured it perfectly.








I used Distress Markers to colour in the church tower, softening with water applied with a water brush to get a subtler look.

And then I simply blended Chipped Sapphire DI over areas of the image, leaving the moon glowing white, and keeping some highlighting on the raven himself.  I considered colouring him black, but decided I preferred the ghostly look!










I also thought about doing some spritz and flick to zhuzh up the background, but again decided on the simple route, leaving the image to shine.  

And if you catch it in the right light, it really does shine - almost to invisibility... which also seems suitably strange and Gothic, in accordance with our theme.




There have been so many glorious entries to recent competitions at Fun With ATCs - it's a real joy to visit them all, and it's incredibly hard to whittle them down to our top picks each time...  I hope you'll be keeping us all on our toes again with your Gothic ATCs - you'll find everything you need to know right here!  Thanks so much for stopping by, and I'll see you again soon, here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.

It's a massively long poem, so I'm going to leave you with just the last couple of verses of The Raven:

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!
Edgar Allan Poe

There can be only one...

Hello all, thank you so much for stopping by.  And a big welcome to the new followers - great to have you with us - particularly as today I'm very honoured to be presenting my first ever Guest Designer project.  It's for Top Tip Tuesday and their One Layer Card challenge.

I was absolutely thrilled to be picked out as having Caught their Eye over at Top Tip Tuesday with my Big Top, and then I realised that it meant I would be invited to do a Guest Designer spot for them - even more exciting - if a little scary!  It got even scarier when they told me that the Challenge for the fortnight I'd be playing would be One Layer Cards.  I have done one for a Less Is More challenge, but the required simplicity is the complete opposite of the project I won with and, as regular readers will know, I'm generally a more-layers-the-better kind of girl!

A One Layer card generally seems to be defined as a folded piece of cardstock with the image(s) stamped directly onto it; minimal embellishments are allowed, but I do welcome a challenge, so I decided to be a purist about it.

Okay, without further ado, let me show you the One Layer wonders I came up with.  Yes, that's plural - three, in fact, I'm afraid... well, if you're going to restrict me to one layer, I'm going to end up with more than one card!

As you can see, these three are variations on a theme... well, variations on a stamp, I suppose.  With CAS (Clean and Simple cards) I think it's highly advisable not to put all your eggs in one basket, at least not if you're a CAS novice.


















With layered work if something goes wrong you can always stick something over the top, or add a layer of paint or tissue tape to distract the eye.  With one layer, if something goes wrong, you're pretty much done for.  If you've read my previous CAS post, you'll know I speak from bitter experience!

Far better, for me anyway, is to have a number of things on the boil, and then you've got a fallback position if disaster strikes!

These were all part of my insomniac creativity a few nights ago... evidently 4 a.m. is a pretty productive time!

The stamp is one I got on ebay for silly money - £2.99 for this beautiful 12.5x12.5cm stamp by Magenta of Canada - I'm so glad nobody else seemed to want it!  It's one of my very few wood-mounted stamps.  While they're absolutely beautiful objects, the clear stamps are so much better for storing - you can fit many more of them in to the same space!


The first one I worked on has a potential Top Tip - a refinement to one of my favourite ways of applying ink to a stamp.

Rather than all one colour, or the precision of colouring the stamp with Distress Markers, this method has the deep pleasure of unpredictability built in.

You apply a sweep of a number of different Distress Ink pads (colours you've selected to complement one another) direct to the craft mat, and then take the stamp on a little wiggly walk across them, pressing down to pick up ink several times.

You can then give them a light spritz of water or, as I did, breathe heavily across the surface of the stamp.


The moisture allows the inks to blend a little on the stamp.  I find the spritz a bit hard to control - you can end up with a very watercoloury effect... pretty, but with a stamp of this detail not so good.  So, for a detailed stamp, the hot breath does the job really well.

To be honest, given the time of night I was playing, I can't remember exactly which colours were swept onto the mat... Vintage Photo is there, and Broken China I think, and maybe Bundled Sage?

For the Tim Holtz sentiment, I applied the same (again... I think they were the same!?) colours direct from the ink pad to the stamp.

For the next I stamped all in one colour, Forest Moss.  I decided to have a play with the Distress Markers, colouring in, and was kicking myself for not having stamped in Archival since now I wouldn't be able to use water with the Markers without messing up the stamped image.

It turned out - as it so often does - that this was a happy accident.  I enjoy turning the Markers to watercolours, but in this case they've been left with the full concentration of colour, and I really like the end result.

I built the blending in from the edge using Antique Linen and Vintage Photo leaving just the centre section with a wholly white background.




Funny how the one I was just messing around with ended up being my favourite of the three!


And then the last one was made with one of my favourite techniques, and colours I love.  It's stamped onto white cardstock using Versamark Watermark, and then embossed with Stampendous Detail Clear embossing powder.  I thought it would be necessary to go with the Detail powder as the stamp is so detailed.

I then inked over using a blending tool, with shades of Faded Jeans, Bundled Sage and Peeled Paint.  I don't have the Peeled Paint ink pad, so instead I coloured a patch of ink from the Distress Marker onto my acrylic block, and used that with the blending tool too.

So I think, in the end, I'll offer this one up as my Top Tip.  If you've succumbed to a full set of Distress Markers, but don't have all the ink pads, you can still blend with any of the 37 Distress colours by using your acrylic block (or any non-porous surface) as a palette.



The sentiment was key on this one, as it really is what I was doing in the early hours of this particular night.  It's from a Personal Impressions set, Creative Thoughts, designed by Lindsay Mason.  And since I loved the sentiment, I chose to stamp it in my favourite blue - the Chipped Sapphire.

The whole card still looked a little naked somehow.  It needed finishing off.  My gut said a border was needed, but it needed several deep breaths before I set off with the Chipped Sapphire Distress Marker and my trusty wooden ruler.  As I said, if you get it wrong on a one layer card, there's no going back - it's back to the very beginning.


Thankfully, I was very happy with my fine, delicate border.  I like that it adds one extra frame to the concentric squares of the stamp (though my border is not precisely concentric, as it doesn't share the same centre as the rest - sorry, that's my inner word-pedant leaping out to cause trouble!).

Many thanks for joining me today here at Words and Pictures, and I hope that I've given some inspiration for creating One Layer cards.  Do hop over to see what the Design Team at Top Tip Tuesday have got to offer - it's fabulous! Plus there's a brilliant tutorial full of great ideas and inspiration too... and do join in the fun yourself this fortnight.


I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
Helen Keller

There can be only one...
from the film The Highlander


I'm entering the middle card in CAS-ual Fridays' challenge this week, which is Square Cards
And I'd like to enter the third card into Twisted Tuesday's challenge Are You Blue? - with a twist of one other colour

Simplicity is complicated

Hello all, and a big welcome to new followers to go with the big thank you to all those already signed up.  It really makes a difference to have you on board for the journey.

An experiment today...  Yesterday, as I was trawling the amazing, enthralling and occasionally overwhelming numbers of crafty blogs out there, one of my clicks led me to Less Is More, a blog devoted to CAS - that's Clean And Simple - card creation.  I'd encountered the term in my travels, but hadn't really spent any time exploring it, but I was so impressed by the work I saw there and clicking onwards from there.

They've got a challenge on this week which is a One Layer challenge... (The added theme for this One Layer challenge is the number 3.)  You can only have one layer, stamping directly onto the card stock, minimal embellishments, and then you're done.  Pretty much the opposite of the shabby chic I've been playing with recently!  But I thought, well, you're a newbie to all this stuff, you should give it a go, so I set out on a whole new kind of challenge...

I can tell you one thing, despite the glorious stamp from Artistic Outpost, the last thing I was feeling while making this card was serene!  Looking at the work on Less is More, it was clear that execution is everything with cardmaking like this - when it's this Clear and Simple, it has to be done with a perfectionist streak of the strongest kind... this was actually the THIRD go at the idea I had!  The plan was to have this beautiful image stamped three times over, each time getting paler, as the background behind it got darker.

When you're doing shabby chic or grungy or layered stuff and something goes a bit wrong, you can add something or tweak something.  With this, if you go wrong, it's over!

At the bottom of the card, the stamp is stamped with the Versamark Watermark pad, and embossed with Stampendous Clear Detail powder (for very fine embossing work).

On the right I've tried to get pictures which show the glossy and raised embossing.

The middle image is stamped in Faded Jeans + Stormy Weather (and there was a bit of Versamark left on the stamp, which after the first two attempts, I hoped would help to get a good emboss on it).

The image at the top of the card is stamped in Cobalt Archival with some Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink added to the stamp.  All three are done with the Detail Clear Embossing powder.

The inked background starts with Chipped Sapphire at the bottom, and moves through Stormy Sky, paling to the pure white of the cardstock itself at the top.
  


I do like how it's turned out to resemble a photograph and its negative, with the strange ghostly darkroom version somewhere in the middle.  Finally, the two upright edges of the card are inked with Chipped Sapphire using a blending tool.

(I'm interested that it seems to have made me make this post very symmetrical too for a change... normal service about to be restored!)

There were several inspirations and ideas swirling around in my head already at the point when I found the Less is More site, and gradually they began to coalesce into one project.

For starters, there was a challenge afoot at The Cheerful Stamp Pad to play with Silhouettes, and the colour Blue is the inspiration at Addicted to Stamps.  I'm also still exploring my lovely new Artistic Outpost stamps, so if a project turns out well, there's always the possibility of offering it up for their July Anything Goes challenge.

 I'd been playing with this superb Serenity stamp just to see what would come up.  


It will come as no surprise to long-term followers that the colours I was playing with were blue and brown!  

(I'd made an inky background by swooshing the paper through puddles of Stormy Sky + Weathered Wood DIs and Picket Fence Distress Stain on my craft mat, and then tried out the stamp in various colours of Distress and Archival Inks.)

It's pretty clear to see where the kernel of the card idea arrived from!  I even toyed with the idea of sticking three of these onto the card, but that would have been more than one layer - so no good!  What it did allow me to do was to have a little play around - I discovered that three images one above the other would fit perfectly on A5, so a folded piece of PaperArtsy's A4 Smoothy card would be ideal.


One of the main tenets of the CAS style is not to be afraid of white space.  So I decided to mask the sides of the card while I did the stamping and inking to keep it beautifully pristine.


It was all going very well, until I tried to peel the masking tape off... disaster!




So, here we go then, right back to the start...

Second go round, the middle image simply didn't emboss well enough with just the inks.  I tried to do an overstamp (always a risky proposition!) using the embossing ink, but I didn't get it placed perfectly, so ended up with a white shadow where the embossing resisted the background ink colours... Back to the start again!  (And hence my addition of the Versamark to the stamp the next time around.)



Well, appropriately for a challenge about the number 3, it was third time lucky (or, rather than lucky, in fact simply ridiculously cautious!).  I made it through the inking of the central column by holding a piece of paper very firmly in place as I blended the ink up one side, and then again at the other side, filling in the middle at the end.

I did the same to get the sharp edges up each side.

I'll tell you something else - it ain't that easy to get a good photograph of a CAS card!  And for once the sun refused to do its usual half hour of shining at about 4 o'clock, so I'm a bit disappointed in the pictures.





Still, despite all the hiccups, I did enjoy working with my favourite colour in such depth.

I love the glossy, dimensional embossing...

...and I do really like the graduated background ink going up the card.

And I'm happy to say the finished card does make me feel quite serene!

But I am more than ever full of admiration for those who work the CAS way... the patience and precision requires a really Zen-like calm, I think - which is not quite where I am just now.  

On the other hand, obsessive perfectionism is definitely part of my make-up, so I suspect there's a journey for me somewhere down the line into the minimalism of Less Is More.

Thanks so much for examining the results of my experiment.  If you've time to leave a comment, I'd love to know what you make of it, and whether you've CAS'd in your crafting time.  Do drop in again soon, and enjoy your time until then however you're spending it.

I'm entering this for:
Less Is More's One Layer challenge, Three
Artistic Outpost's July challenge Anything Goes (with AO stamps, naturally)
LEJ Designs are also having an Anything Goes challenge 
The Cheerful Stamp Pad's challenge this fortnight - Silhouettes
Addicted to Stamps challenge for this week which is to be Addicted to Blue - yup, that would be me!
Stamp N Plus who are having an Anything Goes challenge, free for any stamps this time
Crafty Creations, who are having a Free For All this week, so this goes there too, with grateful thanks for the win for Only you!

It seems appropriate to have three quotes today:

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
Thomas Szasz

They say a person needs just three things in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
Tom Bodett

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.  These three are your greatest treasures.
Lao-Tzu