Serenity by Brenda

Good morning, Brenda here with some of my samples from Lesley's Hochanda shows featuring the lovely Serenity and other Eastern inspired stamps. 

My first card uses the beautiful Serenity which I stamped onto a background created with Distress Oxide inks, adding a sun and rays using gilding flakes which I did my using a mask and adding glue through the marks..............do make sure you wash quickly! The focal image is stamped with Versafine black second generation ink and coloured in with Distress Markers and a fine line gold pen. Some hanging wisteria from Wisteria Lane stamp set and a few flowers across the bottom also from Serenity which I used sparkle pend direct to stamp and a spritz of water to soften the look.

This one used the flowers from Serenity repeat stamped with versafine black and colored in with sparkle pens, a sentiment from Artistic Affirmations which really does have some most beautiful sentiment and inspirational quotes and a set we all need in our craft stash. Finally I flicked some watered down distess ink.

A bit of inky indulgence here using acrylic paint onto a 330gsm piece of card and mopping with a kitchen towel with releavls some of the pattern, random stamping using the Agapanthus stamps from  Wisteria Lane and sentiment from Artistic Affirmations using Versafine black. Some stencilling using texture paste and a stencil made using heart die cuts and when dry painted with rusty patina paints in brown and blue. A strip of hessian and a flower made with punches and inks and all mounted onto a piece of corrugated.

I used Serenity again here onto a background of Distress Inks over which I lightly stamped one of the images from Indian Textiles, using Distress Inks stamped two of the waterlilies from the same stamp set, several Wisteria from Wisteria Lane, cut them all out and decoupaged. Much to the distress of my eldest daughter who is a senior humanities lecturer (and told me only Orange is authentic) I coloured Serenity in purple with distress markers, she wasn't convinced in my argument of artistic licence.

I hope I have inspired you to get inky today and if you don't have any of these stamps you may want to indulge yourself.