Botanical Post Series #3: Using the Stamps as Designed

A wee while ago, I started a series of blog posts linked to a set of stamps I designed for Personal Impressions. As is the way, life, work and being distracted by new ideas meant these posts slipped from my mind!

I'm picking the series up again, as I still have several new ideas to share.

Carrying on from the two published posts, this time I'm using the Botanical Post rubber stamps more or less as they were designed, but combining two sets from the series to create both a card and an art journal page.

Using the stamps as designed

What I used:

Personal Impressions Leaves and Postage Mark Stamp Set

personal Impressions Post Card, Leaves, Flowers & Postage Mark Stamp Set

Personal Impressions Be-Leaf Sentiments stamp set

Personal Impressions Woodless Watercolour Pencils

Versafine Clair Nocturne

Watercolour card

Paint brush

Making the card

I'm a sucker for a 5" x 7" tent-fold card. It's probably my go-to size when I'm creating or even just thinking about a new idea, and that's the finished size of this card.

I started with a piece of watercolour card measuring 4¾" x 6¾" and stamped the Leaves and Postage Mark image onto it.

I kept the colouring fairly simple using PI Pencils and, rather unusually for me, I embraced the white space!

However... it still needed something.

To me, the image looked as though it had simply been plonked onto the card with no real context. So I stamped a few flowers from the Post Card, Leaves, Flowers & Postage Mark set onto scraps of watercolour card.

I used a partial, or selective, stamping technique so that I could pick out just the flowers I wanted. I've used this technique before and you can see that example HERE (photo below)

I coloured and cut out the flowers and added them around the bottom part of the image.

That was enough to make the card feel finished, so all that was left was to add a sentiment from the Be-Leaf Sentiments set.

Using the same idea in an art journal

After making the card, I realised the same design could work really well on an art journal page.

The postcard element can nestle quite naturally alongside the leafy sprig, so it would be an easy design to repeat across a larger page.

For the journal page, I changed one thing straight away. Instead of stamping in black, I used VersaFine Clair Shady Lane.

The background and leaves were coloured in the same way as the card, but this time I used soft yellows for the flowers.

And then I decided to show off a bit!

Using the same Sky Blue PI Pencil colour on a blending sponge, I added some extra detail with the Postage Mark stencil.

I did it twice.

And then I stopped.

The extra detail wasn't terrible, but the page had started to look a little disjointed and cluttered, and the clean aesthetic I had in my head had disappeared.

Do I think it ruined the page design? No.

But it's one of those things that I can't unsee now. And if I hadn't written it here, you might not even have noticed!

That's part of making, though. Not everything needs to be perfect, and sometimes it's useful to look at something you've made and recognise the point where you should have stopped.

Botanical Post Series

      Soft watercolour card            Using stamps differently

 

There are still a few more Botanical Post ideas sitting in my archive, so this series isn't finished yet.

Until next time, take care,

Lou

xxx