Guest Post - Welcome to Fairyland by Lorraine Harrison-Rogers

This week's guest post, designed by Lorraine, is a wonderfully bright and cheerful card featuring Magical Landscapes.  Lorraine has provided a very detailed step by step to sit back and enjoy.

This was such a delightful project to make!  As soon as the stamps arrived I couldn’t wait to use them and kind of knew where I was going with it. So how did I make it?              

1. I chose which of the beautiful castles I wanted to use - I chose this one for the crenellated top and the onion shaped roofs of the towers - I felt this one was really exotic for the colours I wanted to use.
2. Cut a piece of white card stock - 6 1/2’ x 6 1/2’ and drew a pencil line approximately 2/3rds towards the bottom of the square. This is to help place the castle on a water line - if you look closely at the stamp the land and rocks go out into the water. I wanted the castle/land to sit on the line I had drawn, or very close to it at least.
3. Then ink up the stamp with versa mark and stamp the image quickly heat embossing with black embossing powder. On mine I sprinkled a little silver embossing powder around those onion towers too for extra WOW!
4. Next stamp on to masking paper or post it note and cut out placing it over your stamped image where you want to protect the image from your background colouring.
5. Now I used brushes, but I might just have easily chosen a brayer, which would give me a similar finish. I find using brushes in a slow, soft circular motion means that I can get an even finish to my colour blending - it takes practice but it is worth the effort and time. For this I brush over the ink pad, I only use water based ink pads for this technique - never the oil based or permanent colour ones. I start in a corner and using soft, gentle circles, I brush across my paper until I have built up my colour in the area that I want it. I then change brushes and move on to my next colour, starting at the edge of my last colour and blending into it and then over the area I am going next. I continue like this until I have built up my colours. I will go back over areas if I think the colour isn't quite right. The key is not to be afraid of colour!!!
6. When I am starting a project like this I usually test several colours together on scrap card until I am happy with my colour combination.  For this project I chose the strong, bold colours of sunrise for my sky. Starting with an apricot colour, I moved onto a melon colour, soft raisin colour and finished with a strong light plum/purple type colour. I wanted to create light on the horizon without losing the night time colour too much.
7. Using the same method with my brushes I used a deep midnight blue and the same plum/purple for the water, but I avoided around the rocks and land putting those in separately with a colouring pen.
8. Colour your castle, trees, land rocks etc, for this I used Copic markers and a white highlighting pen. I went around my land and rocks darkening the area that would be away from the light. I also drew in a small skyline of mountains with a black pen; in a real sunrise those mountains would not have any light before the sun rose above them so would appear very dark.
9. For the edges I cut strips approx 1 1/4” wide and used the tree line stamp, alternating it upside down and heat embossing with both black and silver embossing powder. To colour them I used the same techniques with the brushes and built up just two colours - the melon and the soft raisin.
10. Finally I stamped the ‘Welcome to Fairyland’ text, again heat embossing this, building up my colour with the brushes and finishing with a couple of rhinestones.

Thank you so much for this gorgeous card Lorranie and for the time and effort taken in writing up the mini tutorial and the insight into your colouring techniques.  I am sure you'll all find this very informative and will want to leave a comment to let Lorraine know how fab this post has been. And if you want to catch up with more of her beautiful work then visit her blog at travellingcolours.wordpress.com