Winnie & Walter Leading Lady - Take Five

Hello, and thanks for joining me on my final appearance as April Leading Lady for Winnie & Walter.  I'm so glad April has five Saturdays - I got an extra week to play with these lovely W&W goodies :)

This week I've been playing with the Scenery: Stripes 2 stamp set.  I wanted to make patterned backgrounds, so I started by transferring the stamps onto a large acrylic block, and kept them pretty much in the order they appear on the stamp sheet.  I grabbed three Distress Inks (Mustard Seed, Twisted Citron and Evergreen Bough, then inked, spritzed and stamped.  Spritzing gives a loose watercolour effect to the images, which is what I like!

I stamped four panels all the same, then I started playing around.  So, going clockwise from top left round the photo below:
The first one I left as is.
The second one I re-inked the stamps in the same order, rotated the card 180 degrees and stamped so that the pattern reversed.
The third one I inked in Versafine Onyx Black, deliberately not getting full coverage so that it didn't completely dominate (it's going to be a background after all), then offset stamped.
The fourth one I inked in Versafine Onyx Black, again keeping the coverage grainy, rotated the card 180 degrees and stamped.

Ok, so now what should I do with them?  As they stand they don't look too promising, but as soon as you lay images on top of them, the strong patterns recede into the background as your eye focuses on the foreground.

Cue some cute pairs of creatures from Big Hugs With Evelin T Designs, and some fab sentiments and speech bubbles from Sketchy Thoughts.  And the co-ordinating cutaways, Big Hugs with Evelin T Designs Cutaways and Sketchy Thoughts Cutaways made it really easy to pull these cards together quite quickly.  Each panel was trimmed first to fit my base card.

So, first off the block were the giraffes, watercoloured with the same palette of Distress Inks.  I used Memento Teal Zeal for the bubble to get the granular effect of the speech bubble to show.

Here's the second card.  Again, I used colours from the same palette for the animals.  When you use a limited colour palette it doesn't matter that animal or people colours are unrealistic.  In fact, it helps to give cohesion to your design.

For card No. 3 I chose to go with a coloured base card for a more vibrant look.  I stamped the speech bubble with Distress Ink, and you can see that the definition of the image is lost, but you get an overall graininess instead.  I added the minimum of colour to the elephants - just a hint of shading - to balance out the background patterns and the speech bubble.

On this final card I spritzed the Distress Inked speech bubble before stamping, which gave a smoother coverage.  On this card and the previous card I kept the darker colour to the bottom so that it could ground my images.

Well, that's it from me as Leading Lady for April.  I hope you've enjoyed my performances and I hope they've inspired you in some way.

I'd like to thank Shay for allowing me to hog the spotlight for the last five Saturdays, and for her generosity in donating a $30 gift card to the Winnie & Walter store to give a way on my blog.

And if you want to be in with a chance of winning it, all you have to do is leave me a comment on my blog post.  To be in with FIVE chances of winning, make sure you've also left a comment on my first post here, my second post here, my third post here and my fourth post here.  You don't have to leave a comment on all five posts to be eligible, but you'll increase your chances of winning!  And while we're loving the love you're leaving on the W&W blog, they don't qualify, so you do need to comment on my posts.

The winner will be chosen randomly from all comments left over the five posts by midnight Wednesday UK time, and I'll announce the winner on my blog on Thursday.  Good luck!
SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave
SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave