Darkroom Door and Art Journey Blog Hop

Welcome to the Art Journey and Darkroom Door blog hop! All 23 members of the Darkroom Door and Art Journey design teams have joined together to bring you a 5 day creative extravaganza! Each artist will inspire you with a project using stamps from both of these fabulous companies. There are also great prizes to be won.

 

 

Here's my project, a Nautical Artist Trading Block.

 

I got some wonderful stamps from Art Journey: Sea and Ripple and decided to make an Artist Trading Block (ATB), so that I could showcase them all at the same time. If you turn the block around, you'll have a different section displayed. For the base of the ATB, I used Eileen Hull's Sizzix 3-D Block, Cube, Bank die (3 x 3 in). This is a little tutorial.

 

Start by die cutting two strips for the block out of white mat board. Did you know that mat board handles ink very well and even works great with water techniques? I smeared some Distress Inks on my craft sheet, misted with water and pressed the die cut mat board into the ink. Leave to dry.

I thought these stamps would work great with a watercolour stamping technique, which also fit with the nautical theme. Ink the stamps up with Antique Linen and Frayed Burlap for the shells, and Tumbled Glass, Salty Ocean for the sea horse and circle. Mist with water about four times before stamping. My son was stamping next to me when I made this and distracted me a little bit, so I stamped the circle stamp on the wrong square - I was planning to have it at the top. Later I managed to fix it, by cutting off the one side, and die cutting a new base. Leave to dry.

I wanted more texture and partial script stamping is one of my favourite ways of adding texture. Here I used Darkroom Door's French Script Texture stamp together with Tree Branch ink. Most of the script is stamped with second and third generation stamping, holding the cling stamp in my hand.

For a water texture Wendy Vecchi's Clear Embossing Paste together with a bubble stencils worked great. Smear it with a palette knife through the stencil, here and there. It dries completely clear.

Splatter the sides with a Gathered Twigs Distress Ink, smear it on your craft sheet, mist once with water and pick up with a paint brush. Tap the brush to get splatters. Assemble the block with strong adhesive, I used Wonder Tape. Ink all the edges with Gathered Twigs. I also used an Antique Linen marker along the joints, removing the visible white areas.

 

To add even more of a nautical feeling, I applied some Glossy Accents along the edge, placed a few tiny shells here and there and sprinkled mica flakes to cover the rest of the Glossy Accents. I also glued down a few pieces of twine.

 

I love the look of this sea horse. The stamps have great detail, which is more visible if you stamp without misting with water.

 

There is also a sentiment stamp included in the Sea set, which I stamped with Salty Ocean ink. As you can see the paste dried clear and almost looks like water droplets. 

The circles from the Ripple stamp add movement to the piece. This is such a versatile stamp. I used a few Chit Chat stickers for more sentiments.

One of the other sides, with more shell stamps, script and the Ripple.

At the top of the block, the Ripple is the central focus, after I fixed my initial problem of stamping it in the wrong place. I wanted it to be on the top because I was planning to place a little collection of embellishments in the centre.

You might be able to see the paste dots better on this photo, they were a bit hard to photograph.

 

There is a giveaway too! Darkroom Door and Art Journey will be giving away a few prize packs, with winners randomly chosen from ALL of the blog hop comments received by Sunday, June 29th. Lots of chances to win some goodies, just leave a comment on this post to enter! Don't miss checking out all the wonderful inspiration.

 

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog!

Your next stop on the blog hop is the wonderful Anette van den Berg.

Remember, if you find a link that doesn't work, you can always hop back to the Darkroom Door blog for a complete list to all the blogs in the hop!

Happy stamping!

Anna-Karin

Supplies:
Stamps: Art Journey: Ripple, Sea, Handmade; Darkroom Door: French Script Texture stamp
Surfaces: Sizzix Little Sizzles White Mat Board
Dies: Sizzix: 3-D Block/Cube/Bank
Ink: Distress Ink: Antique Linen, Frayed Burlap, Gathered Twigs, Tumbled Glass, Salty Ocean; Archival Ink: Tree Branch
Marker: Distress Marker: Antique Linen
Medium: Wendy Vecchi Stampers Anonymous: Clear Embossing Paste
Stencil: Ranger Dyan Reaveley: Dylusions Bubbles 5 x 8
Embellishments: Tim Holtz Idea-ology: Chit Chat stickers; Stampendous Pearlized Mica Fragments; twine