A Gnome on the roam!

Hi there :)  Last weekend I woke up with a 'roaming gnome' on my mind.  While I was tidying up some of my supplies I stumbled upon a NBUS (Never Before Used Schtuff) stamp set... Tim Holtz' Cityscapes.  I vaguely remember purchasing this stamp set but clearly whatever idea I'd had when I bought it had slipped from my mind!  I decided to have a go at something a little different so here's how it went.

I started off by stamping each of the cityscapes onto some plain white card using Rangers Cool Graphite ink so that it had a 'soft' feel to it.

Next I grabbed one of my gnome stamps from My Favorite Things You Gnome Me.  I like the little guy with 'jazz hands' because he looks like he's waving.  Since I wanted the cards to be a set I placed my gnome in the MISTI and then I moved the backgrounds left and right until the gnome was in the right place for each individual cityscape.

I stamped the gnomes onto some watercolour paper since I wanted to do quite a few techniques on the cards.  It actually didn't take long to get them all stamped and heat embossed.  You can see the individual cityscapes sitting underneath the gnomes so that I knew which backgrounds were going onto each gnome.

Next I got out my masking fluid and carefully painted over all of the gnomes.  It's surprisingly easy and it worked even easier with the embossed images.

I left the gnomes to air dry... it's super easy to tell when the masking fluid is dry because it changes to a more yellow colour.

Next it was back to the MISTI.  I put each individual background back into the MISTI and lined it up with my previous stamped image.

Then I placed each stamped and masked gnome into the MISTI to give them their backgrounds which I stamped with the Ranger Cool Graphite ink.

Using the plain card images certainly made the stamping process much easier and I was thrilled when each card front turned out perfectly!

Now for some colour!  I did a bit of a wash over the background images with Pumice Stone and Weathered Wood Distress Inks.

Then for something completely different I opened my brand new Distress Ink spritzer tool.  I was actually super lucky when I went to purchase mine because it scanned up at HALF the price on the ticket!  Yay!!!  I chose quite a few colours to give a light mist with: Pumice Stone, Evergreen Bough, Tumbled Glass, Peacock Feathers and Twisted Citron Distress Markers.

I was thrilled with the effects... and super pleased that I practiced on a bit of scrap paper first too!!  I didn't want to colour in the cityscapes... I just wanted to give a bit of colour to the overall background.

Once I was happy with the background I gave it a quick blast with the heat gun and then it was time to unmask the gnomes.  I had a bit of a 'learning curve' with this... I did my first gnome:

BLAST... bugger... damn... ink where I DIDN'T want it!  You can see it on his cute little gnome face and on his pants.

I couldn't figure out WHY I was getting ink on my card... especially since I'd dried it with the heat gun... and then I figured it out... the ink was sitting on top of the masking fluid!!  DUH!!!

I grabbed a paper towel and dried all the ink off the next gnome:

Then I removed the masking fluid and VOILA... no ink where it shouldn't be!!

Not to panic about the first wee gnome... I just painted over the ink that was on the gnome with my water brush and then used some paper towel to 'lift' the colour and it worked perfectly.

Here's my unmasked gnomes all ready for their colour to be added:

By the time I'd done all of these card fronts it was getting a bit cold in my art studio... there is a definite drop in temperature around 3.30pm!  I took my wee gnomes upstairs along with my Peerless watercolours and added some Flesh Tint to all their faces, hands and ears.

That brought my Queen's Birthday weekend to a close and my poor wee gnomes sat on the table for the entire week waiting to get their clothes!  I'm happy to report they are now fully dressed but I'll show you that in my next blog post.

Thanks for visiting xx