Simplicity Sunday - A tag by Donna Gray

Hi everyone,

It's Donna here today with a simple tag for Simplicity Sunday!

I used one of these small greyboard tags covering it with a coat of black Gesso to create a chalky background. I seem to be in love with creating with black at the moment!

I wanted to make a rainbow as I had an idea to pair it up with the clouds from Whimsical Summer (which I use soooo much). Now when I was at school....yes I still can remember that far back.....we were always told there were seven colours in the rainbow but now it seems to be six?! Apparently some people do not count Indigo as a colour on the spectrum, anyway so I decided to create a rainbow with the six colours then ;)

The rainbow was created by using Zig Clean Colour pens on a piece of water colour paper in an arch shape and then cut out and adhered to the background.

Next step was to take the bird and clouds from Whimsical Summer, colouring them with the Zig pens and then fussy cutting out and adhering theme to the background with foam pads to make then pop.

The finishing touches were to doodle with black and white Posca Pens and then adding a Tim Holtz sentiment.

Ah how sweet the little birdie is dreaming under the rainbow, wonder what he is wishing for?



Stamps Used:

Whimsical Summer

Hope you like it
Donna xx

CAS-ual Friday: ATC by Melina

Hello!

It´s Melina here today on CASual Friday with a cute little ATC to share.

I stamped the Flying Ink Bottle girl on a piece of photopaper that I have coloured 

with Distress Oxide inks. I stamped her once again on a red scrap piece of paper and cut out the wings and label for the ink bottle. I glued them into place.

Then I just stamped the quote from the same stamp set and doodled around the edges 

and my ATC was finished.

I really love this stamp!

Rubber Dance stamps used:

Flying Ink Bottle

Hope you will all have a wonderful weekend :)

Thank you so much for stopping by today!

xx Melina

Technique Thursday - Repeat Stamping by Dot

Hi everyone,
It's my turn today to share a technique with you.  Repeat stamping is a technique that many of us do quite often without even realizing it.  So I thought it might be fun to show how we can use just one word with this technique in a fun and effective way.

Firstly I needed a butterfly mask. Thank you to google I just downloaded a free butterfly template. If you have a butterfly die then that would work great too.
After printing off 2 images, I cut a mask from one, and a reverse mask from the other.
I popped it onto some black card so that you can see the 2 different masks.

I placed the mask onto some white card and blended some distress inks around the edges of the butterfly.

Pinks are the colours that I went with, however you could use any colour that you like.

Black distress ink used lightly will give you a more defined edge to your image.

A little flick of water with a fan brush makes the blending a little more interesting.

As it is only a small area of ink the fan brush will give you a little more control and smaller drops of water.

 Stamping with oxides is fun and easy. The 'Wings' word from Flying Ink Bottle seemed just right to go with a butterfly. I used Worn Lipstick Oxides with the mask still in place.

Iced Spruce oxides was used with the mask on for the top section.

The mask was removed and then the word was stamped in the bottom section.

And then 'wings' was stamped with black Archival into the bottom section.

Using different colours gives the illusion of depth with the words.

I decided that I only needed to use half of the reverse mask, so it was trimmed down and placed onto the card.

With the reverse mask in place I used the stamp 'Solid Butterflies' to add a little interest and to tone down the words. It fitted the theme beautifully.

A little more repeat stamping of the word wings into the top section finished it off.

Some variations:

If you are a bling person it is easy to add some rhinestones or glitter here and there.

Using different colours would look amazing.

Change the mask to another image (like a heart or an animal) and choose a word to fit that theme. Then it's as simple as using repeat stamping to make a fun card.

Tip:

When stamping with words it is a really good idea to see how it looks by stamping it first onto some photo copy paper.  This will let you see if the word is straight.

I hope that I've inspired you to have a go at some repeat stamping using words.


Products Used:
Distress Ink
Distress Oxides
Archival
Masks


Rubber Dance Stamps that are used:

Flying Ink Bottle

Solid Butterflies

Cheers,

Dot x

You need chaos in your soul... tutorial Tuesday with Asia

Hi everyone and welcome to our Tutorial Tuesday on Rubber Dance blog:)
My project for today is an art journal page for my mini journal and it's, well, chaotic:) But on purpose as I was trying to match the beautiful quote: "You need chaos in your life to give birth to a dancing star"- Nietzsche (Dancing Star stamp set).
So let's start the tutorial:)

Firstly I've applied randomly some black Magical powder to the page.
While the paint was drying I stamped the sketch of a person ( RD stamp- da Vinci Body Sketch) onto an ordinary paper and  embossed it with red embossing powder; then fussy cut it.

 I took the circle cluster stamp from the collection Round in Circles and applied with my finger Magic Leaf glue, then stamped it onto the page. Very important part of this process is to wash your stamp immediately with a running water as to remove all the glue before it dries out. When the glue was almost dry on the page ( I admit, I dried it with a heat gun as I am not a very patient person:), I applied with a brush golden transfer foil.

Then I've added some random stamping with Distress Oxide- Abandoned Coral and Archival Ink ( I used two sets of stamps: Collage Elements &  Stitch & Frame.

Then I stamped the quote I've mentioned earlier on a piece of tissue paper, cut it in few pieces and glued it to the page on the top and in the middle.

At the end I added some writing, doodling and crackle accents in the circles all with the idea in my ind to get as much chaos on my page as possible:) I think the chaos is definitely there:)

Rubber Dance stamps used in this project:

Other products:

Lindy's Gang Magical- Blazing Black

Crackle Accents by Ranger

Lindy's Gang EP- Cuckoo Clock Cardinal

Hope you enjoyed my short tutorial:) 

See you soon!

Hugs, 

Asia

Easy and Simple Watercolour Artist Trading Cards by Susanne

Hi there!

Susanne here with a trio of watercolour ATCs. I used the lovely Carved Whimsy Wood stamps together with my Mijello Mission gold watercolours, Memento Inks and alcohol markers.

What I did:
I created the backgrounds with watercolours wet on wet. I used washi tape to frame every card before I painted it.
The lovely images are stamped with Memento inks, because I finished every card by colouring some areas with alcohol markers. Finally I added a Tim Holtz word sticker to every card.

Thank you for stopping by today
xx Susanne.

Supplies:

Carved Whimsy Wood

June Challenge Reminder

Hi my dear stamping friends!

We are back today with a reminder for our running challenge! There are more than two weeks left to join the fun and get a chance to win a 12€ voucher to the Rubber Dance web shop!

These are our themes this time:

Of course you can choose, whether you want to go with the colours or the theme. If you want to, you can also combine both.

Here are some gorgeous inspirations by the design team



Asia
made this awesome mixed media tag
with Whale Wishes and Round in Circles

Dot

stamped this beautiful greeting card

using Textured Feathers and Merry Magpie

Gail 

created this gorgeous mixed media tag

with Round in Circles, Beautiful Bugs and Bling, Bling!

 

Sue

made this stunning bright tag

with Textured Spring and Four Seasons

 

We are looking forward to your entries!

Join our challenge here!

Technique Thursday - Using Clingfilm to create backgrounds by Donna Gray.

Hi everyone,

It's Donna here today using clingfilm to create a quick background....well of course you don't have to use clingfilm just to keep your sandwiches fresh!

I used some wonderful new Flat Matte Sprays from That's Crafty! for this as they're lovely and 'juicy'. You can use watercolour paints for this as well as acrylic paints, just make sure it's quite wet whatever you choose to use. I cut a tag from water colour paper for this as it needed to stand up to a lot!

Here's a mixture of all three sprays on the tag, see what I mean about 'juicy'!

The next stage after spraying the colours is to take a piece of clingfilm and cover the whole tag in it, making sure you wrinkle it up as that's how you get the pattern for the background. The colours pool into the wrinkles and then dry in that pattern.

When I did the first tag I thought I might as well make another one, for this one I changed a couple of the sprays for a different colour combination but everything else remained the same.

This is what they look like all wrapped in their clingfilm coats. Put these aside to dry for a few hours or even overnight depending on how wet they are. If you use acrylic paints then I would definitely recommend leaving them overnight to dry thoroughly.

This is what they looked like after they were both dry, great effect huh? What I like about this is that the effect is subtle so will not dominate anything you then create on top of the backgrounds.

Some subtle stencilling for the background as I didn't want to cover up the pattern too much. I decided to go with the second tag I created as it was brighter.

I thought I'd use the tree from Carved Whimsy Wood but then I thought I wanted to make it look a bit more 'Summery' so how did I do that you might ask.......

Well by stamping some flowers from the Whimsical Summer set and colouring them in with Zig Clean Colour pens of course!!

If you like fussy cutting out then you will definitely enjoy this stage....if you don't then that's a shame ;) I added little foam pads to the back of all the flowers to give them more dimension.

Okay so as you can see I got a bit carried away with the process and forgot to take more pictures but you can see on the tag I used more of the stamps from Whimsical Summer which were coloured with the Zig Clean Colour pens too and fussy cut out. 

I added a little road for the car just by colouring in with Posca pens and added a Tim Holtz sentiment as a finishing touch.

Stamps Used:

Carved Whimsy Wood

Whimsical Summer

Hope you like my Summery tag :)

Donna xx