The Soul Would Have… by Amanda Southern

Hi Everyone

There’s a new set of stamps on the block, Stampendous have released a collection of rubber stamps featuring the fabulous artwork of Laurel Burch and they are available from That’s Crafty!

I love the work of Laurel so couldn’t resist this collection. I would like to share with you today one of these new stamps.

Here’s What I Did:-

I stamped the image, which is taken from Laurels ‘self portrait’ art, and coloured with wax based pencils and blending with oil with paper stumps in order to blend one colour into another. 

After colouring the image I needed a background to mount it on. I wanted something that flowed like the strands of her hair so had to create my own. I decided that I could achieve the result I wanted using the shaving foam technique. This technique has been around for years but never fails to create stunning results so always remains a favourite technique of mine. For those of you not familiar with it you will find many examples on the internet but briefly all I did was spray cheap shaving foam into something, I use an A4 storage box, I spray it in about 1” thick and smooth it over. On top of the shaving foam I drop dye colour inks, I have used several colours of Dylusions spray inks which I drop on using the straw in the bottle, not sprayed. Then using a thin stick ie cocktail stick, reverse end of a paintbrush etc draw patterns in the foam, blending the colours into each other until you like the pattern in the foam. Then take a piece of uncoated white cardstock, watercolour card etc and lay on top of the foam. Leave for approx. 20 – 30 seconds and then pull it off the foam. Lay on your desk, foam side up, and then scrap the foam off, this will reveal your fabulous pattern transferred to your card. One tray of foam will yield many prints and you can keep adding more colours until the foam goes muddy. The other advantage of this technique is that it makes your craft room smell lovely!!

The sentiment comes as part of the stamp and is on the left of the image, I cropped down the coloured image removing the text. I then masked off the face to ink up the text and then stamped it onto the background so I could place it on the right of the image.

All was mat and layered onto black card and added to an 8” x 8” card blank.

Here’s What I Used:-

Laurel Burch Stamp Set by Stampendous - Soul Tears

Black Archival Ink Pad

Oil Based Pencils - Spectrum Noir Colourblend

Spectrum Noir Blending Solution (or baby oil)

Paper Stumps

Plastic Box or Similar

Shaving Foam (cheaper the better)

Dylusions Spray Inks or any other Dye Based Inks

White Card/Watercolour Card/Mixed Media Card

Black Card

Card Blank

See you all next Tuesday

Love

Amanda X