September Elemental Inspiration Picture

Hello

How can it be September already?  It hardly feels more than five minutes since it was cold and dark and I was longing for Spring!

I hate it when the nights start drawing in, but at least the weather has stayed nice and we've had some lovely warm sunny days lately.

I think my dear friend Shabneez feels the same about hanging on to Summer for a while longer - its her turn to set the Daring Cardmakers' challenge this week and its an Elemental Inspiration one this time

It's Shabneez here and yes, I know it's September but I just can't let go of the summer - not just yet anyway!  The elemental board I've chosen has fond memories of summer on it and lots to choose from so I hope you'll join in.  You simply have to pick 3 elements from the board which can be an item, colour, shape etc.

The two things I loved most about this picture board were the bright, vivid colours and the actual layout of the mini pictures.  So I really wanted to use those on my card.  The third element was harder to decide on but in the end I went for the pot plant,  I did actually add another element in to the background of my card, but it doest show up so well on the photos.

Info:

To begin I needed to create the inky background, which I planned to cut up into the tiles on the layout.  I used a piece of plain 350gsm white card stock and got to work with various inks and also some Fresco Finish paints to cover the whole piece of card.  Once dry I chose the sections I liked best for each tile and cut them out roughly before trimming to the correct sizes.  I cut a few spares too, just in case it all went pear-shaped! 

My chosen tiles were matted onto plain white card pieces of the same sizes, and the edges were inked in dark blue.

Next I added a thin coat of Glossy Accents to each tile and left them to dry

The white background piece was the extra 'element' I mentioned; rather than leave it plain I wanted to emboss it with the wavy lines from the lower middle square on the board.  However I don't have a wavy lines embossing folder, a couple of chevron ones but they looked a bit too 'spiky'. So I improvised and with the square of card resting on one of the foam mats I used for shaping flowers I just 'drew' some wavy lines with an embossing stylus.  That's about as far as my drawing skills go, but it worked out quite well, I think! They show up better on the photo below

The white square was matted onto yellow, then onto the card blank.  The tiles were added, and also the die cut sentiment.

The cute cactus or succulent plant is from a Spellbinders die set which I've been meaning to use for ages.  I cut the pot from a leftover red section of the original inky card, and again added Glossy Accents to give it some shine. The plant was cut three times in green card and the little flowers in the same yellow used elsewhere on the card.

Spellbinders dies:

Die D-Lites Sentiments 3 Etched Dies ( loopy Happy Birthday and With Love

Succulent Garden Die D-Lites Etched Dies

It may have taken a while - with all that waiting for things to dry, but I had a lovely time making this.  There's something therapeutic about getting properly inky and painty, and there's the surprise element too as you're never really sure what sort of result you'll end up with (well I'm not!).  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but the fun is always there.  And in my case this time the messy blue fingers!

I hope you'll pop across to the BLOG and see the other cards inspired by Shabneez's great Inspiration board, and of course we'd love you to join in and see what you can come up with too.  We have news about our lovely new DT member and our fantastically talented September Guest Designer over on the blog aswell.

Thanks for visiting

Have a wonderful weekend