Sooner rather than Later: Merry & Bright - Ellen Hutson's 12 Tags of Christmas with a Feminine Twist

Monday, December 12, 2016

Merry & Bright - Ellen Hutson's 12 Tags of Christmas with a Feminine Twist

Hey everyone! I'm a big fan of Ellen Hutson's 12 Tags of Christmas feature, and when I saw this inspiration image last week from Carly Tee Minner's post, I knew I had to play along.

The challenge theme from Carly's post was watercolor, and that's exactly what I did here.

I used one of the solid trees as well as the coordinating outline stamp from my Scandianvian Prints Christmas set. The solid trees were inked up, spritzed with water three times, stamped off on a scrap piece of cardstock, spritzed two more times, and then stamped onto a panel of watercolor paper. That sounds kind of complicated, but it's necessary to achieve that watercolor look. If you use the first inking, it's too solid.

After stamping all the solid trees, I went in with the outline image. This I just inked and stamped, no spritzing.

The sentiment and the stars are from Ellen's Brushstroke Christmas set. I stamped the sentiment first (with Versafine) and clear embossed. I actually added the embossing powder several times to get an extra glossy/puffy look. I didn't bother embossing the stars, I really wanted the sentiment to stand out a bit more. I did add some gold Wink of Stella coloring into the non-solid stars.

Finally, the tag was finished off with some gold and black Color Shine splatter and mist. I started with the splatters, but wasn't getting the really fine splatters I wanted in the black, so I ended up adding a very fine mist in the bottom left and top right corners.

This was a lot of fun to create, just a bit of messing around. I needed a fun little challenge and was glad to be able to take the time to get inky this weekend!

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