That's Crafty!: Something Fishy by Amanda Southern

Hi everyone,

Something fishy for you this week as I’ve played with the recently released Crafter's Workshop stencil “Mini Tribal Fish”.

Here’s What I Did:-

I started with a piece of Strathmore Mixed Media Card and the stencil. I dabbed Distress ink directly onto the stencil using a selection of colours of the mini Distress ink pads. The size of this ink pads work fabulously for this technique but always start with your lightest colour in order to not contaminate your ink pads. Once you are happy with your Distress ink coverage give the whole thing a light misting of water, don’t over saturate the stencil. I then carefully pick up the stencil and lay the stencil, coloured side down, onto the card smoothing over using kitchen paper which also picks up any seepage of colour.

The pattern or image of your stencil is now transferred to your paper with a lovely water colour effect.

This close up shows how the Distress ink colours the fish.

For the background, again I used Distress ink this time using it as a water colour applying the ink to my craft mat and picking it up with a water brush or wet paintbrush.

When I was happy with all the colour I laid down the stencil again carefully lining it up and then with a black fineliner pen drew around the shapes of the stencil. Once done I removed the stencil and joined up all the gaps in the lines making the fish whole. To add further interest to my fish I doodled in the white gaps left in the stencilled fish. I got quite carried away with my doodling so added a matching doodled frame to it. I felt the fish just had to stand out a bit more so coloured all the edges with some matching colours using Spectrum Noir pencils. A sentiment from Tim Holtz Chit Chat Sticker Book finished it off. I then matted onto black card and added to a card blank.