The Colour Red

The Colour Red ATC Swap - February 2014

Productivity has been fairly low lately - although I have been working on some wedding invitations which I'm not allowed to share for a while yet.

However, with a little inspiration from Blue Jelly Stampin  and some free stamps from the cover of 'Get Stamping' magazine Issue 7, I got to work on my first ATC swap of the year.

The free stamps with the magazine were really good quality clear stamps and the sheet of nineteen stamps all had an Oriental theme.

Blue Jelly's layout in the magazine had some really fun co-ordinated ideas for a party using the free stamps, including bunting, party bags and table decorations.

The ATC swap this month, was with the theme 'The Colour Red'.  This always make me think Oriental, so with my hands on the freebies from the magazine, I got to work on a few cards for the swap.

With only a little time left to get my cards in for the swap, I kept the ATCs really simple.  The main images were stamped onto white card in Versamark ink and heat embossed with black embossing powder.  The intensity of black you get with a heat embossed image is a great contrast to the red.

Red Distress ink was applied with a foam applicator to each card for the backgrounds, more ink was applied to the edges to get a deeper colour.

Added to the backgrounds were stamps of tiny cherry blossoms from the magazine stamp set and a couple of starburst stamps from Hero Arts (Single Starburst, wooden block) in the same red ink.

Different shades of red ink were applied using fibre tipped and gelli pens to the open areas, like some of the cherry blossoms, lanterns or parts of the Zentangle stamp.

The lanterns were stamped and embossed on a separate piece of card, coloured with red ink and cut out.  These were then mounted overlapping each other using dimensional glue gel.

 

 

My favourite one of the four is the crane.  This card isn't actually going off to the swap, but will hopefully still find it's way to a special member of our swap group.