Winter challenges

One of the challenges of winter is the warm days, like today. It may not sound hard to take but when you get rain instead of snow you get ice covering everything. And, I may be wrong, but the bitter cold seems to keep the germs at bay whereas the unseasonal thaws don’t.

But this post is really about a couple of card making challenges I am entering. The first is the current CASology challenge “winter”

and the second is CASe this Sketch #10.

I have been inspired to enter a few more challenges by Ardyth who enters several regularly and always nails each one. I think I have said it before but I actually find challenges quite, well “challenging”. It seems to me that being given the parameters for a card is a sure way for all my inspiration to disappear.  I was pretty safe with the ‘winter” challenge as I never seem to tire of those winter scenes and the sketch was similar to one of my favourite layouts so I was, this time, up to the challenge. It still took me two attempts to get it right!

This branch is from a Penny Black halloween set but as far as I am concerned it can be useful all year round; I just left the bats out! I stamped the branch in black first then, using a stamp positioning tool I stamped it again in versamark a little above the black image. After embossing in clear powder I was able to sponge the sky behind and expose the snow laden branch. When I had the snow banks and sky completed, the scene really cried out for a little contrast. A few red berries would have been perfect but I didn’t want to risk wrecking it by adding them over the sponging so instead I added a few hints of pink to the sky and snow.

Enjoy your weekend.

Supplies:

Stamps:   Wishes, Hoot of a Time (PB)
Inks: Memento  Teal Zeal, Angel Pink,Versafine Onyx Black, Versamark(Tsukineko)
Also: clear embossing powder