Dare 2B Artzy’s November Challenge

Hello Dare 2B Artzy fans! Well it’s the start of a new month and that means that we’ve got a fresh new challenge for you with Dare 2B Artzy! This months challenge theme is:

THANKS!

After all, November brings about the start of the Holiday Season and many of us will be spending time with friends and family over the next several weeks. It’s a wonderful time to count our  blessings and be reminded of the people in our lives who we have to be thankful for each and every day!

For my challenge card, I went with a bit of a fall theme using the Dare 2B Artzy , Tangle Leaves once again. I’m kind of in love with these stamps – they’re so much fun!

I started off by cutting a piece of Canson Water Color paper to 4 1/2 x 5 3/4. I used two different Tim Holtz stencils; Dot Fade and Squares.

Using the Dot Fade stencil first I misted it with some Distress Mica Spray in Antique Bronze. Obviously you get a different result using the sprays each time as they are water based. I actually found that having two or three watercolor panels cut provided me with some extra backgrounds for later use as there was enough product left on the stencil front that I could lay it on another piece of water color cardstock to pick up the excess and create another image.I actually found that I liked the results from the excess spray better.

Once I was satisfied with my initial stencil spraying, I chose the Squares stencil and placed it on my cardstock and once again misted it, this time using some Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist in Mardi Gras.

I heat set the background before I tried stamping. Since this was water color paper the mists sort of pooled on the top of the paper. The heat just sped up the drying process a bit.

Next, I stamped my leaves and the little acorn from the Dare 2B Artzy Tangle Leaves set with some Versamark. I used my MISTI tool so that I’d be sure to get a good clean stamped image on the water color paper. The MISTI allows you to stamp multiple times in the same place without having to worry about your stamp moving and creating a double image on accident.

When my images were stamped, I sprinkled some Charcoal Embossing Powder on them. This embossing powder has some glitter in it and it has a sort of black and silver tone to it so it gives a nice light reflection. I heat set them.

With my leaves stamped and embossed, I was now ready to use my Spectrum Noir Sparkle pens and paint them. Spectrum Noir Sparkle pens are water based and very much like Wink of Stella pens and they come in several different colors. For my leaves I used, Fig, Olive Jade, Silver, Sage, Pink Champagne and Smoked Quartz.  The pens have a brush end so it’s very much like painting but with sparkle. Again, these pool on the surface of the water color paper so I did use my heat gun to set the colors a bit between applications. They did dry a bit darker than I was expecting so next time I’d probably use some lighter colors and just apply more layers to get a more vibrant color. My little acorn turned out very dark with the smoky quartz.

Once finished with that I set my panel aside and pulled out my word dies. I had a couple of different dies that had the word Thanks in them, but one was smaller than the With Thanks so I went with that.

I wanted the die to be a bit of a focal point, but I had a lot going on with the card panel so I decided to make it a layered die cut sentiment. I cut 4 layers with the purple card stock and one layer from a piece of gray glitter card stock. I glued all 4 layers of the purple card stock together with some glossy accents and then I used the gray glitter cardstock as my offset shadow. I glued them a little off to give the appearance of a shadow behind the words. The dimensional piece was glued to the front o f my panel. I love that adding the several layers to the words really made them pop off the page. It’s such a fun technique to use with die cuts to give some added dimension to your projects.

Next, because the stencil I used has a bit of border around it – it left a diagonal white space on my panel. I just used that to my advantage and added some gray dimensional gems along that white space for a bit of added interest.

We hope you’ll play along with this months challenge theme: THANKS! As always, there will be an awesome Dare 2B Artzy prize pack up for grabs. You could win some sweet Dare 2B Artzy stamps to add to your stamp stash!

Please be sure to check out the Dare 2B Artzy blog today for some challenge inspiration from Monica Edwards who made some amazing flowers for her project (love them) and Karen Nofzinger who created a beautiful card.

Thanks for stopping by!

Tonya