By the Garden Gate

Posted: March 28, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Echidna Studios, garden fence, Inktense pencils, Stampin Up | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

The Garden Fence set is an Echidna Studios digital stamp set that I designed and my daughter digitised. The set includes a gate, three pots and a grass & flowers image. Each image is stackable which means you can arrange your own garden design with pots and gate beside each other, behind each other or even on top of each other if that sounds fun!

Both the gate scene above and the individual pots on the tag shown later in this post were printed on hot press watercolour paper on an ink jet printer. In the past I have always printed on a laser printer but my daughter recently bought a second hand printer to test some colour printing of our designs. We printed some black outline images to see how they were to watercolour.

The gate design above I coloured with inktense watercolour pencils and blended the ink with water and a very fine brush. The ink from the printer did bleed a bit so you can some some grey tones here and there. Because I used very little water I was able to keep the bleeding to a minimum. I received the lovely ‘exposed brick‘ embossing folder for my birthday from a couple of friends who know just what I like. It seemed an appropriate background for the slightly aged garden gate.

On this little tag I used a mix of inktense pencils and Zig clean color real brush markers; again there was some bleeding when I added water but no so much as to make me stop colouring and blending. All that to say if you have an ink jet printer it might be worth printing and watercolouring some images just to see how it goes.

I’ve been making some vintage style collage cards lately (I’ll share them on the blog soon) so I decided to find a book page as background for my watercoloured tag. I blended vintage photo and antique linen inks around the background and tag and added some typewriter alphabet stamping on both. Unfortunately I stamped the alphabet upside down on my background but I continued with my card anyway! I like the pairing of old fashioned conservatory with modern little pots just for fun.

I’ve featured the Garden Fence set before; take a look here and here. This post includes affiliate links from Foiled Fox and Scrap’n’Stamp . If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Birthday Garden Gate

Posted: April 13, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Echidna Studios, garden fence | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments

This is the second card I’ve made with the Echidna Studios ‘garden fence’ set of digital stamps. On the first card the images were smaller to fit on an A2 card and the arrangement was a little different. These digital images are great fun to work with as they are not transparent so when I position each pot it masks what ever is behind it.

I printed the image on hot pressed watercolour paper then did all the colouring with zig clean color real brush pens. Those pens are juicy! I added only small dabs of ink to the foliage and flowers and blended it with a waterbrush. I blended blue and green between all the fence posts to make the white pop and added a line of grey as shadow.

The sentiment is from an old faithful Penny Black set, banner sentiments. The curve of the stamp fitted nicely over the curve of the gate. The finished card is 7¼” x 4⅛” which is not a standard size I know. I will either make a custom envelope or put it in a slightly larger one.

Most of my garden is out from under the snow now so not too long before I can be working with real pots not digital ones!

(Compensated affiliate links from Foiled Fox, Scrap n Stamp)

At the Garden Gate

Posted: March 24, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Echidna Studios, garden fence, Inktense pencils | Tags: , , , | 5 Comments

This little front fence is a new digital stamp from Echidna Studios. It’s a set of five images that you can arrange yourself. Each image is opaque (or stackable) which means when you arrange them before printing you can put the plants in front of the fence and in front of each other. The five stamps are the fence, the triple topiary, the flowers in the grass, the flowers in the pot and another pot not featured on this card.

I had great fun arranging these images to create this little scene. After finalising the scene I printed it on hot pressed watercolour paper and coloured the images with Derwent inktense pencils. I use inktense pencils it two ways; sometimes I colour directly on the paper then blend with a wet paintbrush, other times I pick up ink from the sharpened tip of the pencil with a paintbrush and then paint.

After colouring the pots and the plants I had to decide how to colour the fence and gate because it wasn’t going to stand out if I left it white. The problem was that I wanted a white picket fence. I ended up colouring the fence and gate with an embossing pen then embossed with Ranger weathered white embossing powder which is textured and creamy coloured. It’s subtle but it does make the fence stand out a little. I coloured the hinges with a gold gel pen.

To add some sky I blended speckled egg distress ink here and there, then splattered some over the scene. The sentiment is from Penny Black’s ‘only you’ set and all the links can be found below.

Thank you to all of you who have left such kind messages about my daughter’s digital design etsy store. Thank you to those who have popped over to purchase some of her digital stamps. We would both love to see what you have done with the images. You can attach an image when you comment in the store or even use the contact button to send her a message.

(Compensated affiliate links from Foiled Fox, Scrap n Stamp)