Taheerah Atchia

Hey everyone! Happy Friday!

I can’t believe I’ve already had my first week off work! Time has *flown* by! I’ve mostly napped and laid around whilst my body catches up with all the busy-ness of the year that’s been, but of course I have been creating as well! Tomorrow I plan to dedicate to mass producing all those Christmas cards! People will almost certainly get them a little late, but better late than never – I hope!

Anyway, back to today’s card! I’ve been watching this month’s CASE Study Challenges with great excitement and interest as they are featuring Cath Edvalson’s Moxie Fab World posts as inspiration! I just haven’t had time to join in as a week goes by too quickly and with too much tiredness when I’m working. 🙁  But as I said yesterday, that’s the beauty of holidays!!

Enough rambling from me. 😛 I do seem to be in a chatty mood today! Here’s the gorgeous inspiration we were given to challenge us this week:

Stunning, no? Here’s where my interpretation took me:

*Squeal* I *love* how this turned out!!!

So, obviously I wanted to keep with that beautiful bird, the different colours, the black images and the watercolour look. But as you can see I turned the whole CASE inside out – literally!

I started with some Distress Watercolour Cardstock. I wanted a silhouette of a bird but to use the positive as a mask. I drew my bird onto scratch paper then carefully trimmed him out. I knew I needed to actually mask my watercolour paper with something that would repel water and watercolour, so I used some Masking Fluid to fulfil that. You can get this stuff in art stores and it dries to a rubbery-like finish. I opted for the colourless fluid as it’s guaranteed non-staining, but you can get one that is lightly tinted if it’s important for you to see where you’ve applied it. Personally I could see the colourless one on the paper anyway. *wink*

I used the negative of my bird shape as a mask so I could then apply a couple of layers of the fluid, then removed the mask when the fluid had dried, leaving behind a positive mask of the bird (are you with me so far? lol). I then wetted my paper and used watercolour paints (the proper ones!) to add some layers and washes of colour, allowing them to bleed and blend in places. I loved the final effect!! I stamped a few of the stamps from Lil’ Inker Designs’ Modern Mehndi set using Archival Jet Black ink. I have a jumbo sized version of this inkpad to make it a breeze to ink up large stamps, it’s awesome!

When everything was dry I rubbed the masking fluid off leaving the bird behind. I did have to add a couple of extra layers of colour in a couple of places just to make the silhouette more defined, but essentially the fluid did its job!!

I finished up by stamping the sentiment from WPlus9’s Valentine Wishes set using Versafine Onyx Black ink, then mounted my panel onto a Pure White card base. When the focal point is this much of a scene-stealer you really don’t need any other accents. 🙂

Well, that’s it from chatty me for today – but I will be back as usual tomorrow with another post! I would love it if you left some love before you went on your way! Thanks so much for stopping by!

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