Sending You Sunshine - Silver Birches

Hello Treav,

I hope that you like your birthday card.  As you often show an interest in the method here is how I did it - step by step.


1. Take a piece of white matt cardstock cut to A6 size, a black inkpad and the Silver Birch stamp.

2. Ink up the stamp and stamp the Silver Birch image on the card.

 3. Ink up the stamp in a different colour (brown in this case)
and stamp image on a piece of Safmat, which is self adhesive printing film. (N.B. I have enclosed a small sample of Safmat with your card together with the packaging information sheet for you to see.) 

4.  Carefully cut out each of the four silver birch trees using sharp embroidery scissors.

5. Here they are all cut out and ready to go.

6. For each tree, peel the self adhesive image off the backing strip.

7. Lay each self adhesive tree on top of its corresponding image stamped onto the A6 white card.  The Safmat sticks to the image and acts as a "mask" which protects the image on the white card underneath while I work on the background.  I took this photo before covering the fourth and last tree on the right.

8.  Now to the background. Take a "rainbow" inkpad which contains broad "stripes" of complementary colours.  This one is called "Foliage". You also need a "brayer" (a soft rubber roller used for transferring ink to card) and a blending mat.

9.  Ink up the brayer in the yellow ("butterscotch") end of the inkpad and transfer the ink to the blending mat. This "stages" the ink and helps create a blended airbrushed edge rather than blocks of colour with hard edges.

10. Place the artwork on a piece of copy paper (to avoid inking up the dining table!) and begin brayering the yellow ink into the top right hand corner.  Repeat with a darker colour ("terracotta") in the bottom left hand corner.

 

N.B. Safmat has a slightly shiny surface and the dye-based ink just rolls straight over the top. You can see the "masks" becoming more stained as the background is built up.


11. Using make-up sponges add more depth of colour at the corners/edges leaving a graduated fade towards the centre.  

 

12. Begin the leafy border using the silver birch leaves stamp and the various shades of ink from the "Foliage" ink pad. "Blot" the stamp onto copy paper each time so that the image stamped on the artwork is more faded i.e. "second generation" ink.  Build up the border slowly bringing in more depth of colour at the corners/edges.

 

13.  Once happy with the leafy border it's time to peel off the Safmat "masks" to reveal the white card underneath i.e. the silver birches.  The adhesive is "low tack" and so doesn't tear or mark the card underneath.  

 

14.  The last stage is to stamp the words into place using the same black ink pad as I used for the silver birches.

15.  Voila! The completed art work. 

16.  The card insert and envelope are decorated by masking off areas with a torn piece of copy paper, sponging "butterscotch" ink onto the exposed areas and over-stamping the silver birch leaves in various colours.

17.  Assembling the card is simple construction; cutting card to size, folding, sticking etc.

Time taken to make card approximately one and a half hours (plus ink & glue drying time between stages).

Time taken to photograph stages on phone, email to laptop and download to hard drive, upload to blog and write text for blog - considerably longer!!  But this is my first blogging attempt.  Hope that you enjoyed it.

Happy Birthday!

Love Maggie xx

PS Since writing the above I've installed an app on my phone which enables me to upload photos from my phone direct to blog (rather than via laptop hard drive as I did for this post).