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Welcome to my blog! I currently post about my crafting journey, but plan to add more pages that touch on the other life journeys my husband and I are taking. Please stay tuned as we share these experiences. Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you find something to inspire you!


Stephenie



Monday, July 18, 2011

Peacock Beauty -Take Two

This weekend, I was thinking of peacocks because of the beautiful image by Designed2Delight in the Friday Freebie Challenge.  I have posted on this AWESOME concept each week, so check out my previous cards for this Challenge and definitely check out Designed2Delight!  Anyhoo, thinking about peacocks brought back memories as a child going to a relatives house who had peacocks.  They were so pretty, they just amazed me.  Then I remembered going to Busch Gardens in Florida with my daughter on her band trip.  There is a white peacock there that was so different than the color infused peacocks that you normally see that it just stood out.  This is the memory that got me thinking of ways to reproduce a white peacock.  I thought it would be easy, just use clear embossing powder over the image and darken the cardstock around it.  This is the result of that idea:


The blue color is not from the ink I was darkening the cardstock with, it is the color of the embossing pen.  Well.  Next I tried just outlining the image with clear embossing powder and coloring in the image with white pen and clear embossing that.  This is the result of that process:



This kind of worked, especially the second one.  The problem is that the white color would actually overlap the clear embossing powder ( I used a white gel pen and then a white opaque pen) and block out the black lines.  Since the second try was a little successful, I decided to try it on a bigger image, these images are wallet size.  That one turned out to be such a flop I won't even show you the results.  I kept trying to think of a way to make this work...I will  probably need to find a clear embossing pen, but I do not know if they make one and right now, I do not have one...so on to the next idea.  I have used a technique with stamps that I really like, but usually on a more solid image, but I thought, what the heck, I have tried everything else.  I started this trial on the big image because it is easier to define the lines without making everything a blob.  Since I was wanting a white peacock and the clear powder wasn't working, why not just use white embossing powder.  This has the opposite problem than I had with the clear embossing powder, I do not want any black line showing.  So once again I completely outline the peacock with my embossing pen and cover it with white powder.  I had to do this several times to get good coverage on all the lines, but it is pretty well covered.  Next I took my dauber and with a circular motion, started to color in the image with different colors.  The colors used were CTMH Tropical Blue, Clover Meadow Green and Goldrush.  The more you color it, the darker the contrast and it can really make your image clearer.  The whole effect of this process is a softer image than coloring it in.  Kind of dreamy, like some water color pictures.  I really liked how this process turned out, so this one was made into a card....





Another person who submitted a card on the Designed2Delight Challenge named Lucy used feathers on her image and I thought that was so pretty, I used some fringy yarn I had in a dark blue to outline the image.  The next layer is white cs embossed with the Ornamental Iron embossing folder on my cuttlebug.  I made two embossed papers, sponged it with CTMH Tropical Blue stamp pad, cut them down to fit on a 4.25 x 8 card base side by side.  The sentiment is stamped on a Studio G frame with CTMH Moonlight Blue, unfortunately it did not come out solid enough, so I outlined everything with a pearlized blue gel pen.  I had outlined everything else, so why stop now. lol  Now you know how my morning went, if you have any ideas on how I could get a white peacock, please let me know!  I hope you like how my card turned out.  Have a GREAT week!

4 comments:

  1. I give you an A+++ for effort! I don't think people (non-crafters) have any idea how we slave over these details!
    I have an idea for you. I would suggest you change the black line color to a very soft gray. Then it would not take so many tries to get good coverage.
    I think it turned out great and now I know what not to do. Ha ha! (jk) Thanks for playing with Peacock Beauty in our freebie challenge at Designed2Delight.

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  2. Wow! This is stunning! Thank you for all you shared! :) What a creative idea!!

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  4. I like Peggy Sue's idea for gray - but your peacocks are FABULOUS. Beautiful job! :)
    You can try a Versamarker for digi embossing...but I find trying to emboss using glue ink markers is difficult, especially with a larger image. They just seem to dry too fast!

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