Fun With Masking & Stamping

Hello All!

There is a fantastic sketch over at Mojo Monday today that I absolutely loved; with its tall, skinny design, and long double banners, it instantly caught my attention and I had to play with it! :)

Using the Inky Antics “Cupcake Birdy” stamp set, sticky notes, and some ink, I quickly created a “sweet”, almost-one-layer card, using very little supplies… let me show you how!

Starting off with a 3 1/2″ by 5 1/2″ card base made from watercolor paper, I stamped the cupcake into the upper right of my card and also onto a sticky note. I fussy cut the cupcake out from the sticky note, leaving a thin border around the lines of the image; this will allow create a slight highlight around the cupcake, which will help it stand off of the banners better.

Once my cupcake image was stamped onto the card, I began roughly sketching out where I wanted my banners to be. After I was happy with the placement of my banners, I started the masking process…

Banner One (the teal colored one in the front):

1. Apply the cupcake mask over your stamped image.
2. With five 3″x 3″ sticky notes, mask off the front banner; two on each side, and one rotated 45° (with the corner inside the “v” of the banner).
3. With teal ink and the “birthday” stamp from the “Cupcake Birdy” set, stamp it in a staggered pattern all over inside the masked area
4. With Peacock Feathers distress ink and an ink blending tool, add color to the edges of the banner, leaving the center lighter than the edges.
5. Remove all masks, except for the cupcake.

Repeat steps 2-5 for the second banner (the pink one), replacing “birthday” for “happy” (stamped in dark pink ink), and use Worn Lipstick distress ink for the blending.

Now that I had the banners in place, I was ready to move onto the frame surrounding the elements… Using four sticky notes in the center (overlapping), and eight around the edges, I inked the unmasked area with Milled Lavender distress ink and an ink blending tool.

With all my masking now finished, I moved on to the coloring of the cupcake itself, using coordinating distress inks and a couple of watercolor brushes.

From a piece of white cardstock, I cut out a 1/4″ banner and stamped the Happy Birthday (using the same two stamps used earlier on) in Jet Black StazOn ink. I adhered the banner directly onto the card base.

Some white faux stitching was added to the edges of the banners, and because I love things that sparkle, I also added some bits of shimmer to the frame, cherry and sprinkles with Wink of Stella clear glitter and various glitter glue colors.

Its amazing to see how much dimension you can create with some simple, but strategic shading. Hope you had fun with today’s tutorial! Happy Creating! :)

Supplies

• Ranger Inkssentials Watercolor Paper
• Recollections White Cardstock
• Tim Holtz Distress Ink: Worn Lipstick, Peacock Feathers, Spun Sugar, Milled Lavender, Dusty Concord, Antique Linen, Tea Dye, Fired Brick
• StazOn Jet Black ink
• Inky Antics Cupcake Birdy stamp set
• Uniball Signo White gel pen
• Wink of Stella clear glitter brush
• dark pink and teal pigment ink
• sticky notes
• glitter glue