The runner up

Today I will show you my other 2 works for Designer of the year competition entry that gave me a runner up place! :)
First the card I made with Tilda's papers: "Sweet Christmas", "Tiny Treasures" and "Happiness is homemade". Love them all!

The other work was off the page (so not a card) creation and I decided to do a shadowbox with my favourite theme - steampunk!

I chose a small square canvas to work on and painted it thoroughly with black acrylic paint. 

I emossed lots of cardstock with industrial patterns of Sizzix folders. Then all was cut up into bits. I dubbed them with my fingers and inks: Archival Brilliance Cosmic Copper and Platinum Planet, and StazOn Jet Black to achive the realistic "metal and smear" effect. I layered them up on the back side of canvas creating a "window". 

As a focal point I used die cut heart (Xcut nesting hearts) that was also embossed and inked.

Then I used all of my favourite cogs, gears and sprockets dies. I got many different from various brands: Spellbinders, All Occasion Dies, First Edition, Xcut and I use them all equally (fabulous if you do lots of boys/men cards). All cogs were inked with my messy fingers and arranged on and in the box, some of them were given the screw top brad or just a normal metal colour or black brad.

The skeleton metal key was glued to the heart.

Then I printed out sentiment, cut it into pieces and attached on the sticky foam to finish off.

Another work that was really hard to let it go into the world... :)

My entry for Designer of the year 2015

I tried myself in "Simply Cards and papercraft" magazine in their Designer of the year competition. It was last year so for almost 2 months I thought I had no luck but when I bought this month's magazine I discovered I was chosen one of nine runner ups!
Here I am showing you one of the cards I made for the competition. Took me hours and hours of work! :)

I started from embossing the kraft card into woodgrain for a background. I used here letterpress technique so deeper parts were inked with Distress Vintage Photo. To highlight the 3D effect I hand drawn bit of a light on raised parts with a white Sakura's Jelly Roll pen. Then I inked edges with black ink.

For my focal stamp I used Prima's Bloom Girl Sophie. Love this stamp so much!

I spent good three hours colouring her with my Promarkers and again used white pen to highlight the details.

Next was to add some decoupage for the flowers so I stamped the girl few times more but coloured only the chosen flowers. After cutting them with scissors I placed them on a silicon mat and with embossing tool I curled the petals and gave dimension to my flowers, then layered them up with glue.

I also added a generous amount of glitter glue in their centers.

Finally I have stamped the sentiment on a kraft card and cut around it with my deckled edge scissors creating old style banner, also adding few "tears and wears" with a craft knife, then inking the edges with Distress Vintage Photo.

I really love how it turned out and it was rather hard for me to let it go in the post :)

Hello again and Happy New Year!

So I haven't been on the blog for so many months that I really don't know where to start. I think I will start from "Hello again!" and "Happy New Year!" :)

Many things have happened during those long months of my absence and I decided it's time to focus more on arts and mixed media, therefore will be more cards, pictures, assemblage, decorative items with use of paper and paint, shadowboxes, albums, notebooks etc. Mostly anything that involves getting my fingers dirty with inks and glue :)

Because we just passed the Christmas season I would like to show you some of the cards I made for family and friends. To be honest I made almost 100 this year so here only some of them.

Enjoy!