Friendly Challenge - No Trimmer!

Hello there scrappy friends, for those of you in the UK I hope your Bank Holiday has been fabulous (of course it rained!). I had organised a day crop on Saturday, sadly had to be cancelled but luckily for me I had also arranged to visit my dear friend Helen on Friday. 

We shared the layouts from a challenge I had set, which was to create a layout without the use of our paper trimmers!

My layout was based on punched circles cut in half taking inspiration from the macaroons in the photo.

The only cutting tools I used were circle punch, craft knife and my trusty scissors!

The papers I used are all from July's kit at Like Forever. 

The bottom corner embellishment cluster.

I doodled around all the half circles to make them stand out more.

Top corner.

Helen's layout featuring a very young self.

Helen's cutting tools were craft knife and heart die with added ripping!

Helen used a couple of wooden embellishments (the heart and the word Happy) which she painted to co-ordinate with her layout.

These flowers look beautiful with sequin centers.

For her background Helen used a combination of water colour, stamping and ink splats.

Hope you enjoyed our latest challenge, our next one is a sketch from good old Pagemaps.

Helen and I had been chatting on Facebook before Friday and we were saying that we couldn't get the background effects that we wanted from water colour and Helen asked me about using Gelato's.

So we decided to spend our day experimenting with different techniques.

First of all we tried plain water colour paper with a wash of water.

We painted onto this watered down Gelato's, Distress Inks, water colour paint and Cosmic Shimmer mists to see which one gave the best effect.

We decided that the paper absorbed the paints/mists too quickly. 

So then we tried coating the watercolour paper with white acrylic paint and the difference was amazing, we could layer the paints to create more of the background effect we were looking for.

Change of tactic here using plain cardstock, mist splats and water spritzing.

Plain cardstock and and splats of really watered down water colour paint.

Acrylic paint covered cardstock, splats of watered down Gelatos. This worked ok but you could clearly see the brush strokes from the acylic paint. 

Acrylic paint covered cardstock, then Gelato's drawn straight onto it and misted.

The Gelato's didn't dissolve very well and I needed to smudge with my fingers to blend with the water better. Again you could clearly see the brush strokes from the acylic paint. 

Plain cardstock, splats of watered down Gelatos and large salt grains sprinkled on. Left to dry before rubbing off the salt. Helen tried this with mists instead of Gelatos but the salt grains didn't show as well.

My least favourite effect - Cosmic Shimmer on plain cardstock then misted straight away with water.

One of Helen's favourites - really watered down watercolour paint on plain cardstock. 

First she brushed the paint on then added splats of it to soften the edges.

My favourite was plain cardstock with a water wash first then misted and splattered with Cosmic Shimmer mists.

We also discovered that the different heat guns used to dry the examples made a difference to the end result.

Helen's heat gun used heat and air and mine used just heat.

Helen's heat gun was much more effective at moving the wet paint around and drying it quicker.

Normally we wouldn't spend hours testing paints and techniques to find out the different effects and it was so useful and fun to play for hours on end with paint.

Please excuse the long post today but I wanted to share these with you as well as having a way of checking back on the techniques and effects that came out of the day.

Enjoy your week.

Thanks for stopping by.

Hugs,

Kerry. xx