Dina Kowal Creative: Joy Clair Stamps

I'm hanging out with the My Sweet Petunia team today - hope you'll join us for a special hop with Joy Clair Stamps! Prizes are involved... so keep reading for all the details! If you just happened on the blog hop because you're a regular reader of my blog, and you'd like to view the entire hop, keep reading, and you'll find a full list of participants at the end of my post. If you're already hopping and you arrived here from my friend Lindsay's blog you're doing just fine.

I had so much fun making this card, though this was my 4th attempt at getting it right! I used 3 clear sets from Joy Clair - Hugs and Smiles, Wonderland Letters, and Sketchy Chevron Background. I started off by stamping the flowers at the bottom of the card then masking to stamp a second impression in the remaining space. I actually cut 2 masks at once, and the MISTI made this task really easy. I lined up 2 sticky notes on my card and stamped right where I had the stamp in place already. Then I cut the 2 sheets together, and had the 2 masks I needed for the next step!

I had a little trouble with the chevron background printing in the negative spaces, so I ended up cutting away one line to use by itself, like a border stamp. I positioned it at the top of my card, and stamped twice for a good solid impression...

...then moved my card up 3/4" each time to create stripes for a full background.

The flowers were colored with a combination of Copic markers (base colors) and colored pencils (shadows and highlights).

The sentiment was built with individual stamps from the Wonderland Letters set -

Joy Clair has some gorgeous large (6"x8") alphabet sets - I think this one will be great on some future mixed media canvases! My sentiment is backed with a black Inchie Plus square from Inchie Arts, which gives it some really classy dimension.

While I had my supplies out, I made another background - this time I used pastel chalk inks, and created some color variation by stamping one impression with my chevron border, then moving the card up 1/4" to create a darker area in the overlap.

The sentiment on this card is from the Hugs and Smiles set - it's full of all kinds of sweet mix-and-match sayings with a fun script font. I used a variety of watercolors to color in the flowers on this panel - I tried using the inks from the background but the effect was more pale - I like the more vibrant colors here, and it was fun to mix them up a little.