Step-By-Step: Combining Alcohol Stampin' Blends and Water Based Marker Coloring with Welcoming Window/Mountain Air

How's Life Friends?

Today is a belated Step-By-Step Saturday post.

I'll explain.

I was going to roll out a new content feature on Saturday while continuing my Welcoming Window series for Mother's Day cards...and then this happened:

This is the bottom of my Stamparatus which has magnets stronger than the sheet I keep on my desk to corral my metal dies;) I didn't even realize that I was missing these other dies...yet!

I had 'lost' the window die in Welcoming Window...and I couldn't let it go. Mostly because I was worried that I'd thrown it away accidentally. I dug through my trash—twice—and it was an open loop I couldn't get past. It derailed my whole day because I let it. I'm not complaining about my first-world problem. I am noticing what pushes my buttons and this is always a good thing to know about yourself!

Now I know where to look first when I think my system of magnetic sheets on my desktop has failed me. Lessons learned!

I've been reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. I'm late to this particular party [which even has its own acronym much to the author's delight: GTD] but I've always been an amateur industrial engineer! [They look at processes and systems and how to make them better] I resonated with the open loop clutter/paralysis which results from it that Allen discusses. I'm thinking about some ways I can address this as I continue with my learning and self coaching and how I can help others do the same.

Now on to the Step-By-Step.

The first step in my process for making this little scene was to make a practice one on scrap paper. I keep a bunch of it handy for stamping on, and for layout combinations/composition. It's the little one on the left. Notice that I used water/dye based stampin' write markers to stamp the mountains and selectively color the tops of the trees on that stamp. I went back in to stamp a second row of trees to fill in the gaps to my liking at the base of the mountains.

Next, I broke out the alcohol markers--Stampin' Blends. When you color over water based ink with alcohol, it just fills in but allows the other to show through. It's also easy to color around the peaks for the sky and the lake water to blend them for a beautiful, realistic look:

You can see both types of markers here and how each of the little windows came out! I think I liked leaving more of the white space in the practice one than I did on the 'real' ones. What do you think?

I enjoyed the memories of visiting National Parks and their distinctive buildings/signs while making this card. I saw lots of posts last week about National Parks Week and love this Instagram artist:

https://www.instagram.com/subparparks

If you've ever been to any of the parks she illustrates you will enjoy the humor!

Hope you got something out of today's content, and that you're starting out your week with a fresh idea of getting things done. May all your loops be closed,

Be Well Friends!

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