These were my submissions:
The preference he requested were to use as many recycled items as possible, and only using what you had on hand. Mainly because I’d been doing a lot of experimental watercoloring, all of my cards were done on watercolor paper. I also used some stamps that hadn’t been used in so long, I had to clean the dust off of their wooden bodies, lol. Lots of watercolors for backgrounds especially, some us of markers, and lots of collagey ephemera. Parts of one of my Gram’s old patterns that I would never use were on the sewing themed cards. And the book pages were from an already damaged copy of Breaking Dawn from the Twilight series, lolololol. It’s been a long time since I got creative with paper products in this format, but it was a lot of fun and made my brain work really hard to come up with ideas for my cards. Hilariously, most of them are halloween because the only stamps I have are Halloween or castle/dragon related, ROFL. I hope my recipients weren’t too disappointed, LOL.
These are so great! I’ve just found the guy on insta (he’s new to me) and have seen a really cool technique called Junk Mail Spin Art Journal DIY using a fan… looks messy and cool
Hey, I recognize that stamp set because it’s in my supplies as well! Your stamping came out really sharp and the coloring looks amazing. They were done with watercolors? My stamping doesn’t always come out nice and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I use Staz-On, but maybe I need to switch inks?
I used to have a lot of paper supplies once upon a time, but I picked up sewing about 10 years ish ago, and Mom kept stamping and card making, so I was using what I had on hand, which was this thick ass watercolor paper. It wouldn’t stamp well on the textured side at all which wasn’t shocking, but I was going for a distressed look and it just didn’t work out, lol. But the back smoother side worked great. I have a staz-on now, but at the time I used an Archival Ink pad in either black or espresso.
I do keep my ink pads stored upside down so the “juice” stays at the top, I’m not sure if you do that as well, but it’s something I learned a long time ago, that has proven to be very effective in keeping my pads as juicy as possible, and ready to use each time. And as far as Staz-on vs the Archival Ink pad, I don’t think there is much of a diff between them. I stamped those same images a week later with a staz-on that Mom let me borrow, and they stamped just as well, so maybe it’s the paper you are having issues with? That seemed to have more of a negative impact on my images than anything else.
The whole experience, I have to admit, was a little taxing for me, lol. I havn’t done paper crafting in a long time, and my supplies were very limited. lol. Torn pages out of a damaged Twilight novel, and water colors for the coloring, though on a couple of them I did use markers. Both Arteza supplies. The watercolor set was the dry round pans, I think I have 36 colors on that. And the markers are called Twi-something by Arteza. Kind of a Tombow knock off, but pretty good for what I was using them for. They seem to have pretty good quality supplies based on the things I’ve used of theirs. Mostly, I just tried to be creative with what I had on hand, and my goal was just to be at the very least, on par with what other people did, lololol. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, lol.
I saw that swap on Mark Montano’s blog, and was sorely tempted. But, I knew I was too busy to make the deadline. I would have loved to have received one of your postcards! Frankenstein is my favorite monster!
That is brilliant to store them upside down! That never occurred to me, even though I store my Sharpies upside down. I have a dropper for Staz On black ink to refresh the pad, so maybe if I add a bunch to it then store it upside down it will work better.
Your stamping came out really sharp and the coloring looks amazing. They were done with watercolors? My stamping doesn’t always come out nice and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I use Staz-On, but maybe I need to switch inks?