Craft A Scene- A Winters Scene

Hi folks, this is my first post for the Craft A Scene  DT, and the brief was to create two pieces with a winters scene. The second one comes along on the 19th Feb.

       After a few flicks through my Stampscapes stamps, I picked out the ones I wanted to use, then had a long think about how to create a wintry look, without just adding a load of snow. ( Which just so happens to be falling outside right now!).
 I was still struggling with how to look wintry, but decided to get started on the stamping, and hope for inspiration. This image very, very almost went into the bin- I had a complete disaster part way through- and the funny thing is, it was in the rescuing that I got my winter look.
I have quite a stack of brayered backgrounds, from when I was practising to get the hang of it, so I selected one that I thought could end up with the right look. It is a piece of Matt card, from Lavinia Stamps, brayered from the bottom with Stonewashed, Sailboat Blue & Denim Adirondack dye inks, and from the top down with Cool Peri, Purple Twilight, and a little Eggplant right at the top. Before brayering I added a circle punched from a post-it note to the upper half of the cardstock.
I used Versafine Onyx Black to stamp the images. Most of the elements of this picture come from Nature Sheet #6. I started with the Lakeside Cabin (147F) on the right, then stamped Lakeside Island (from Nature Sheet #4, The Lost Scapes) next to it, using a Stamp Positioner to marry them up. I placed them about 2/3 of the way down the card,just where the blue started to fade out. In the foreground I stamped Ledge (054F) twice, varying the angle slightly, then added Reeds Lge (068D) randomly. I used Water Pattern sm (231C) in the water area.  Final stamp was  Spooky Branch (273G) stamped reaching in to the picture on the left and upright on the right. You can see on the design sheet that the Ledge stamp is much larger than in my scene- I just used a small portion of it to give me a river/ lake bank. Equally, you can layer & stack it to give you a larger rocky area.

            Having taken the design sheet out of my folder to scan & show you, I could see similarities in my scene to the image on the sheet.

   So all was well up till now,  when I decided I ought to have a reflected moon in the water. Considered a few options, and decided to try 'stamping' a moon shape in Brilliance Moonlight White, using a round foam brush. My instant reaction was that it looked awful- it didn't work at all. And that I had ruined what was a promising picture to boot.I tried wiping the white ink off- that smudged and looked even worse. Next I tried cleaning that area with a baby wipe- now I had a patch with a different colour ink to the rest of the image. So, as a last resort, and as I had given up any hope of this image being usable anymore, I wiped over the whole image with the baby wipe- I had black ink coming off the image, as well as the white! Panic!!!! So now, completely stressed by everything going wrong, I folded a piece of plain white copy paper in half, put the image between the two layers, put a book on top of it (oh yes, it was curling up too!), put it to one side and went to cook tea.
 When I went back to it the following evening, I had no expectations of it being any use, and fully expected to be throwing it away. However, as you can see, what the baby wipe did was take enough ink away to give me a misty, ghostly look- perfect for mist/fog falling over a lake in winter. Trust me folks, nobody was more surprised at this than me. I had gone from scrap to perfect by sheer fluke.

The Lost Scapes #4

 Which does go to show that you should never consider anything past retrieving- no matter how bad things seem! I must be mad, but I decided to push my luck a little further- I have never used a white gel pen on images like this before, but I have loved the effect when others have done it. I found out my White Gelly Roll pen, only to discover it had dried up from lack of use! I have since managed to get it working by dunking it it warm water, but I purchased a new one from Joanna Sheen- which only took a couple of days to arrive, and sat down to work. As you can see I outlined the edges of the islands and added some white to the fir trees. I did the same with the Spooky branches, Reeds and the Rocky Ledge.  I used an Orange & Yellow gel pen to add a little light to the cabin windows. Finally I added a few squiggly white lines to simulate the moon in the water- very nervously, I might add- then trimmed the image down and matted it onto black, then onto dark purple cardstock.
 For the base card, I folded an  A4 piece of Gold card in half. The embossed background was made with a Cuttlebug folder, Snowflake.  I cut two strips of white card the width of the folder, and almost twice as long, embossed the image once, then turned the white card around and embossed the other end. The two lengths were then joined together with sellotape on the back, and cut down to fit the front of the card. A strip of pale blue ribbon covers the join. Mounted the image to the front, and breathed a sigh of relief, lol.
              I suppose this could be a Christmas card, which means I have actually managed to start them in January- so I only broke my New Years Resolution by a half (I wanted to do two Christmas cards a month).

  I hope you will join us over at Craft a Scene, I am looking forward to seeing the other DT's take on the brief, and what you all come up with.