Bay tree cottage

This is the large Bay tree cottage stamp from Lavinia stamps. 

All images were coloured with Copic markers.

This was a fun stamp to colour and create different backgrounds for.

I've combined it with  a few foliage and flowers stamps.

I used different techniques for each of the backgrounds. For the card above I used blending brushes and  ink pads to blend in the sky and the grassy hills. The background trees were created with a twig stamp that comes with one of Lavinia's trees and the foliage on the tree was created with the small foliage stamp that comes with the Spring Tree stamp set.

On the card above I wet the card well and sprinkled on the tiniest amount of Brusho granules. I find this a difficult technique to use as my attempts usually end up really dark and  way too blotchy for my liking. I think, I ended up washing most of the Brusho off. Then allowed the card to dry before stamping on it. I did add the tiniest amount of stencilling to the sky on this one.

  Ah I think this has to be my favourite technique for Fantasy backgrounds. It's very easy to do.

 Having said that, I do get days when I just cant get it right and have to give up and try again the next day. 

Using blending brushes and an assortment of colour ink pads.

 I  usually use  barely banana or so saffron, but any yellow will do. Blueberry bushell, Melon mambo, Concorde crush. If  you know Stampin up colours you will know that these are really strong colours.   To achieve this pale look you need to dab the brush in the ink pad. Tap most of the ink off in the lid of the ink pad,  then brush off a little more ink off on scrap paper.   Especially if your ink pad is really juicy. You want next to no  ink on the brush for this to work best.

Then you can get to work on your card stock. Once the card is covered I used a cheap water paint brush filled with thin bleach. |Then I splatter bleach all over the card stock. Leave for a few seconds then blot off with some tissue.

I have to confess, I really did mess up the background on this one. Not wanting to waste all my work on the cottage, I decided to cut it out and glue to a new background. I used blending brushes and ink pads on this one again and made the stencilling a little more prominent.

I masked off the house, and  stamped a few blue and purple flowers around the cottage, and then a tonne of foliage in various greens and a yellow.  I used various  small foliage stamps,  all of which are available from  Lavinia stamps. If you don't have any tiny foliage stamps, take a look in the £1 section on the website for some mini stamps.

With some different colour Posca pens, I dotted on lots of flower heads and added highlights to the stamped flowers. 

The fried egg flowers took several layers of white posca for them to stand out. 

I  love to dot on Stickles glitter glue to these images for a more magical look.