Christmas Deer and Tree Cards

I think to anybody that reads my blog on a regular basis, its becoming obvious that I'm in love with distress inks and creating my own backgrounds for cards. This current experiment has resulted in4 cards being created for my stash and six more to be finished over the next few nights.

The technique is simple, first I created inky backgrounds on water colour paper using various shades of green and blue distress inks, first covering the paper with the inks using the inking tool, the misting with water to set the colour and transform it. After the papers are dry I misted them with gold misting spray for the green backgrounds and silver for the blue, then I allowed them to air dry again.

Once completely dry, I cut the pieces to the size I needed to fit inside my embossing folders and embossed the image on to the paper. I used the deer embossing folder from the Sizzix 'Starry Night' set by Brenda Walton for the deer cards and for the tree I used the Darice 10.8 x 14.6 cm Christmas Tree embossing folder. Once I'd embossed the images I used metallic pigment ink, again gold for the green cards and silver for the blue, using a small circular blending tool I lightly rubbed over the raised image to add the ink.

The next step was to sprinkle the wet ink with Papermania Holographic Embossing Powder, this created a sparkle and helped to seal the metallic pigment ink. On the deer cards I added some clear and god adhesive gems from my stash. Each embossed image was mounted on to silver or gold foiled card and then stuck to a 5" x 7" cream card that ad first been covered in a backing paper that went with the image. All the backing papers were printed off from CD's or free downloads.

I'm thinking I may add to the deer colour ways with some red and gold embossed images and some yellow and gold and maybe a purple and silver variation. For the trees I want to do some blue colour ways and again maybe some red. The finished cards look better in real life than the photos, more shimmery and sparkly.