Love - ClarityStamp February Challenge

The Clarity Challenge this month has the theme of love. Great, I thought, I can make something for hubby for Valentine's, two birds and all that, and I'll get it done in plenty of time. T'was not to be!

This bookmark (which I have given to the ever patient hubby) was meant to be the trial run before I tried my tentative hand at a canvas, but the end of the month is here, so this will have to be my entry.

Hubby and I were both drawn to some of the lovely colourful entries last month, so I wanted to do something in that vein.

I started with stencil card, cut to size for the bookmark holders. The first layer is acrylic paint, applied through the harlequin, Jo's bubbles and abstract squares stencils.

I think this looks very eighties! I have a limited range of paints, mostly primary colours, which probably has something to do with it. I also tried printing onto the card with bubble wrap, but wasn't that happy with how it came out - a lot of it got filed back and covered over later.

Once the paint was dry, the next layer was distress inks (definitely not primary colours!). I used peacock feathers, picked raspberry, mustard seed, spiced marmalade, crushed olive, dusty concord and mowed lawn - I think that's the lot! Applied with a blending tool on the Clarity blending mat.

This completely changes the look, it's much richer, and grungier, now.

The next layer of pattern came from the pattern plates stamps. I used distress inks - chipped sapphire, dusty concord and peacock feathers - and black permanent ink where I wanted a stronger effect.

You can see this is where I've also changed the bubble wrap print with ultramarine acrylic, applied through selected bubbles in the Jo's bubbles stencil.

The last step is to add the letters. I used the wheelie alphabet stencil, with versa mark pen, then added silver embossing powder.

The finishing steps are to drag the black permanent ink pad around the edge, cut a piece of black card to go behind it, and  put them together into the bookmark holder.

And that's it. Not elegant or sophisticated, but I think it's a lot of fun, and quite funky. Maybe one day I'll get round to making the canvas version.