Merry Monday - BA Inspiration

 Good morning folks, Julie here with a little bit of BA Inspiration. 

In keeping with my aim to create all my Christmas cards before the end of November, I'm back with some Merry and Bright Christmas inspiration for you.

For my inspiration, I used the latest challenge over at CAS Christmas, where their cue word this month is RAINBOW. Rather than use the larger stamps from our Christmas sets, I used some of the smaller ones and used them in unusual ways in a rainbow theme.

My first card uses the tiny tree from Christmas Pop and stamped it in a rainbow pattern following the line of my die cut snowdrift. 

I first cut a snowdrift from some scrap card and traced a line in pencil as a guide for my stamping, then starting roughly in the center and working outwards, I added my rainbow of trees. After stamping the sentiment from Festive Sentiments onto the snowdrift, I glued it onto my card, as simple as that.

My second card is probably my favourite of the three. When I was teaching, many years ago, Rene Magritte was one of the artists that we used as inspiration, especially the paintings where he paints features of the face but without the actual face being there, such as Les Belles Relations and The Paysage de Baucis. The features are in the correct anatomical place so your brain fills in the gaps. This card is a little like that, this time it's Rudolf!

The antlers are from Background Builders:Vines, Winter Additions, the baubles are stamped with the small flower center from Wonderful Day and his nose is the flower center from Kindness Blooms. His eyes were drawn freehand with a black fine liner and his nose was made shiny by the addition of some Glossy Accents. A few hand drawn lines for the strings and the same sentiment from Festive Sentiments completes.

My final card was a little trickier to make and had a bit of a shaky start!

My first attempt ended up in the bin as I managed to get an inky splodge in the bottom corner after I had completed it, this is the second attempt, after an initial dry run on some scrap paper!

I doodled some lines in the rough shape of a tree in pencil before adding the bulbs from Background Builders Christmas 2018. Once the ink was dry, I drew over the pencil lines with a black fine liner then left it again to dry before rubbing away  the pencil lines and coloured the bulbs with my Zig watercolour markers. To give the bulbs more impact, I gave them a coat of Glossy Accents, the same sentiment completes.

Well that's about it from me for the moment. I hope I've inspired you to use those tiny stamps that sometimes get forgotten and to think outside the box when it comes to your cardmaking. 

Keep safe out there.