Everything Papercraft - Sealing Wax

Sealing wax, originally used for securing envelopes and scrolls, makes interesting, stamped  embellishments that can be adhered to cards, albums or other paper craft projects. You can buy sealing wax candles at many craft supply stores and stationers as well as metal seals featuring monograms and other simple designs.

Happily, we can also use our stamps to add fabulous seals and wax embellishments. Here’s a simple technique:

1. Trim the wick of the sealing wax. Light & let drip into a puddle. Let it sit for about 5 seconds.
2. Ink up a small image with an embossing stamp pad, which has a long open time, and stamp into the wax puddle.
3. Hold for about 3-5 seconds then lift straight up.
4. The ink keeps the stamp from sticking to the wax and can also add a little bit of colour.

Photo from the internet

A Sheepish Smile

Carla has created two wonderful cards with the new Warm and Woolly set of stamps. She used Polychromo pencils to colour the images, one on kraft card stock and the other on a white background.

Carla's Blog

Hot Tip Tuesday

Reducing Your Stash III

Become a Faux DT Member

Choose a few items from your stash... a piece of card stock, some patterned paper, ink, embellishments and a stamp. Now imagine that you've received these items as part of a design team kit and it's your job to create three or four projects that would best show off these items. What will you make? How will you use them in an interesting and creative way? How will you minimise waste to get the most out of the products?

This is a fun and creative way to use up some of the items you have in your collection. If you often scrap or paper craft with friends, consider choosing items for each other to make it a little more challenging!

Jackie's Woolly Friends

Check out these cute projects created by Jackie Trinder. She used two of the characters from the Warm and Woolly set of stamps to make a fun card and a fabulous bookmark. How great would it be to receive both these lovely treasures in the mail?

Jackie's Blog

Tutorial - Colouring Proteas

No matter what you're colouring or the medium you're using to colour, you will always achieve the best results by layering the colour. Even if you're planning to use a single pencil, applying layers of pigment will allow you to build depth, resulting in a lot more dimension in the image.

I start by applying a very light layer of pencil to the entire image, which is basically the groundwork or colouring plan for my project. 

From there, I focus on one part of the image to work on at a time. In the case of the proteas, I'm starting with the leaves and stem. After adding the base colour, I work with the mid green in the high areas of the image - the places that are raised and catch the light.

Now I switch to a darker green for the lower areas. The darker colour will recede, helping to shape my leaves and give the appearance of a round flower head.

A yellow-green on the tips of the leaves gives the appearance of fresh growth and helps to bring the tops of the leaves forward.

A hint of red on the tips of the leaves will help to tie them in with the flowers and give a more realistic look to my colouring.

The final step is to add some shadows with a dark grey. I've chosen a warm tone since the flowers are red and there's quite a lot of yellow in my green.

To colour the petals, I start with some mid green into the base and then add a little dark green at the very bottom of each petal. Adding the dark colour will help to shape them and give the illusion that they're curved.

Most of the red is concentrated at the tip of each petal, and then gradually lightened as it reaches the green. The colours will blend as you add one over the top of the other.

Some more grey to deepen the shadows at the base of each petal and under the leaves.

The final step is to colour the centre part of each flower, again using layers of colour to deepen shadows and help give the illusion of depth.

To finish the colouring project, I stippled in some green alcohol marker, concentrating the darkest colour around the flowers and getting lighter as I worked outward.

Stamps:

Tutorial - Masking

A great way to build a scene with traditional stamps is to use masking, a technique that involves covering a part of the image to prevent ink or other mediums from being laid down in particular areas. In the example below, I stamped the first sheep and then placed a mask over the top of the image so that I could add the two sheep in the background. Let me show you how...

Firstly, stamp the image that's going to be at the front or foreground of your scene. In my case, it's the little sheep who is laying down. Stamp the same image on a post it note or piece of adhesive masking paper and then fussy cut.

Unlike traditional fussy cutting where you want to retain the outline, when creating a mask you actually want to cut away the outer most line. This will allow you to stamp right up against the image without leaving a little white gap. As you can see in the photo below, I have trimmed away the stamped outline on my yellow mask.

Place the mask over the stamped image and then add the additional stamps in the background.

Remove the mask and you will have all three images layered perfectly and ready to colour. You can keep the mask and use it again for another project. It should last through quite a few uses providing it doesn't become too wet or damaged, and if you find the adhesive no longer sticks, you can simply refresh it with some repositionable glue.

Stamps:

July Winners

Congratulations to the July Challenge Winners!

Yvonne G., Mel C. and Gail Hutchinson

You are the randomly chosen winners of last month's challenge.

If you already have a Beccy's Place store account, I'll be adding a $20.00AU credit very soon.

If not, please email me at beccy@beccysplace.com to claim your prize.

New Releases

This month's new additions have arrived in store!

Proteas are unique and beautiful Australian flowers that come in several colours from the bright red shown in the images below, to shades of cream and white. As with the majority of Beccy's Place digital stamps, the set comes with both black and white line drawings as well as full colour images for quick crafting.

Proteas

digital stamps

Available in Store Now

Looking for something cute and cuddly with just enough sass to be interesting? These may be the ladies you've been waiting for... "Warm and Woolly" is available as a digital set or in clear stamp format with matching cutting dies.

Warm and Woolly

digital stamps

Available in Store Now

Warm and Woolly

clear stamps

Available in Store Now

Warm and Woolly

cutting dies

Available in Store Now

August Challenge

Create a card or paper-craft project using any Beccy's Place image, upload a photo of it to your blog or other hosted site, and submit a direct link below. The challenge runs from now until midnight on the 31st of August 2021 (AEST).

To keep things interesting, I'll be adding an additional optional element to the monthly challenges, and this month it's a flip-a-coin challenge! As always, keep in mind that the additional challenge is just an optional extra.

PLEASE READ THE CONDITIONS CAREFULLY

BEFORE ENTERING THE CHALLENGE

• Entries that don't meet the conditions will be deleted from the challenge.
• Your project must be created during the month of August 2021 and entered into the challenge during the active challenge period. Due to an automated system, late entries cannot be accepted.
• Each month I will include a re-mastered digital image from my library of freebies as well as a bonus challenge, such as a card sketch, bingo grid, etc. You DO NOT have to use the image or bonus challenge on your project, but you MUST use a Beccy's Place image, either free or purchased, to be eligible for entry.
• You can enter as many times as you like and you can submit your card to any other challenge you wish.
• At the end of the month three winners will be chosen to receive a $20.00AU store credit for any digital stamps at Beccy's Place. To redeem the store credit, winners must have a Beccy's Place customer account. (Please note, you do not need an account to enter the challenge. It is acceptable to create an account in the event that you win. Accounts can be closed at any time.)
• Store credit won during any Beccy's Place challenge is only redeemable for digital stamps.
• Entries can be uploaded to the challenge from any hosted site including blogs, online galleries, Google photos, etc. If you do not have access to a hosted site, please feel free to email your photos to me and I will add them from the Beccy's Place Guest blog.
• Beccy's Place designers may enter the monthly challenge but are not eligible to win prizes.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER