Handmade Postcards

Last Sunday we travelled to Harrogate and visited the Great Northern Papercrafts Extravaganza – great fun! I got some really cool stencils, stamps and dies which I have been playing with this week.

On Monday I signed up to take part in the iHannah’s DIY Postcard Swap 2013. (There’s still time to sign up if you’re interested, you just have to pledge to post 10 handmade cards by 30th March.) So I have been busy this week making my ten cards for the swap.

I started by creating a set of coloured backgrounds using Inktense Watercolour pencils. Next I added a contrasting colour using Acrylic paint and an Artist Cellar Stencil followed by a stamped image from IndigoBlu using a mixture of distress ink and staz-on ink pads. I followed this with a layer of gel medium to seal everything and to stick on the word definition tags, which I created using more stamps from IndigoBlu and a Creative Expressions stencil, and the die cut letters from memory box. Lastly I added another layer using the same stencil with acrylic paint.

I created the backs of the postcards using a free postcard backside from iHannah which I had to resize to fit my postcards, then added a digital stamp which I made using a scan of another Creative Expressions stencil, some hand drawn bird shapes and a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche.

The completed postcards are now sitting waiting for their recipients addresses to be added!

Faces and Letters!

Today I have been getting really messy! In addition to creating my face for 29 faces, I’ve been playing with letter stencils.

I created today’s face using pencil, watercolour pencils and acrylic paint. She still doesn’t look entirely like the one I was copying, but I’m getting better!

I signed up for this free workshop, Use Your Words, from Carolyn Dube the other day and have been having fun playing with letter stencils for the first lesson.

I started off with a collage of torn newspaper which I covered with a few layers of acrylic paint. Then I started playing with stencils! As I didn’t have the letter stencils Carolyn recommended, I made my own by removing a set of chipboard letters from their holding sheet, then using the sheet as a stencil. I used the whole alphabet and numbers to create the first layer, then made the word ‘creative’ over the top in a darker colour. I finished off using an Artist Cellar stencil to create a bit of interest at the bottom of the page.

I quite like how it looks right now, but I have a feeling I may be adding some more to it later!