Our theme at Visible Image this week is Mindfulness, and for my non-card assignment I've made two bookmarks (although they could just as easily be tags). I prefer physical books to e-readers, so bookmarks
are a necessity for me.
I wanted the main focus of my bookmark to be half of the huge butterfly from the Butterfly Effect set, along with the sentiment "every single thing you do matters". But I can't just stamp half a butterfly so I positioned it fairly centrally on a piece of A5 watercolour card, then inked it with Distress Stains.
I spritzed the watercolour card before stamping, which allows the stain to bleed out over quite a large area. The advantage of using a stamping platform is that you can re-ink and re-spritz any areas that didn't get enough bleed.
Once it was dry I added some pearlescent paint from the new metallic paints set to the central area of the wings.
Then using Distress Inks in the same colours as the stains, I inked the butterfly and re-stamped it to give definition.
I chose Shabby Shutters, Crushed Olive and Salvaged Patina for the background to represent sky and greenery.
Using the same inks I stamped the background stamps a few times, and the small butterfly and sentiments in black. You can also see where I've used the Windows stencil in a few areas.
I also used the large stamp from the new Particle stamp set, which is a great background set.
Because I wanted the butterfly at an angle I couldn't just cut the panel exactly in half, but who says what size bookmarks have to be anyway? I flicked some of the aqua metallic ink over the two panels, along with some white gesso.
Here's a close-up of the first bookmark,
