That's Crafty!: The Impatient Queen by Amanda Southern

Hi Everyone

I back with you this Tuesday sharing an art journal page using a couple of the new fabulous stamps designed by Kate Crane for Carabelle Studio.

Here's What I Did:

As with a lot of my backgrounds they begin by being created on my gel plate, however for these I tried for the first time using alcohol inks on my plate. I added dots of alcohol ink in shades of blue around the gel press and then lightly brayed the ink around to cover the plate, don't worry if the ink dries for this technique. To create the image in the background I chose to use one of Kate's printing squares, Florals & Feathers and inked it up with the Alcohol Ink Lift Pad and then laid the printing plate into the alcohol ink on the gel press and pressed it into the plate. The ink lift removes the ink from the gel press leaving behind the impression of the stamp, you have also got the alcohol ink on the printing square which you don't want to waste so I then printed with it onto a piece of white stamping card. To remove the stamped impression from the gel press I just lightly brayed a thin layer of white acrylic paint (you could use any colour) over the entire press and then laid a piece of card on top and took the print from the gel press, you will find that this then removes all from the surface of the gel press and gives you a fabulous print, 2 for 1 not bad!

Here you can see both prints as I added a contrast strip into my page that is the piece that I stamped the printing plate onto but the main page is the pulled print with which you get so much detail. Apologies for the shadows on the photo.

Next stage was to add more details to my background and I started by adding some red contrast strips of gel printed scraps next stages included inking up AALL & Create Secret Star Stencil, which I added Candid Apple Distress Oxide to lightly spritzed with water and pressed down onto my page. I stamped one of the Carabelle Studio Printing Plate Coasters onto the page using Faded Jeans Archival Ink (from my stash). In black Versafine Clair I stamped parts of the barcode stamp that you find on 13arts numbers stamp set. More stencilling using That's Crafty! Large Circles Dinky Stencil and white gesso which when dry I scribbled, with black fineliner, around and then finally some torn washi tape from AALL & Create.

I added the white stencilled circles and a bit more washi tape after this stage.

Next was to stamp out the 2 images, both from different sets, onto water colour card and they were then coloured using Kuretake Zig Colour Clean Brush Pens and a water brush. These were then cut out leaving a white border and added to my page.

The quote I added comes from cutting it out of a copy of Alice in Wonderland.