Friday, December 18, 2009

Merry Christmas 2009


Joy to the World
May your Christmas be filled with Holy Light!

______________________________

Here are the steps I took to make my Christmas Card.
It began with the idea of making prints for each card,
but as is often the case, it was not turning out like I expected.
I wasn't happy with the colors. Then after making several prints,
just the right solution presented itself.

Step 1
I made a stamp out of craft foam sheets.
Step 2
Printed stamp with rubber stamp ink onto copy paper*
Step 3
Covered stamped area with clear embossing powder
Step 4
Melted embossing powder with heat tool
Step 5
Placed bleeding tissue paper* on top of stamped embossed image
Step 6
Spritzed with water to make tissue paper colors bleed.
Step 7
Blotted with paper towels and speeded up drying with a hair dryer
Step 8
Removed dried tissue paper to reveal watercolor design on paper
Step 9
Ironed it between sheets of clean copy paper over and over until
the embossing powder has melted off. ** (protect your iron ) This will create
a vellum finish to the copy paper and create a batik look.

*Copy paper works best to achieve a translucent vellum batik effect.
**I purchased bleeding tissue paper at a teacher supply store.










Step 10
At this point I was not happy with the way the watercolors were
looking with the green ink of the image. I was wondering
what to do as it was also becoming labor intensive to
make the number of cards I was wanting to make.
At this point I was ironing one of the images with it face down
and saw what a beautiful image was showing up on
the back of the paper as the embossing powder melted through.
I went through all of the designs I had made at that point
and found one that was outstanding. And so I scanned
and printed it to mount on my cards.

Here it is below before being scanned. The scanned final image
is the first image at the top of this post.

And here it is!