Why Hello

Hello ! Today I am sharing my most recent make for Viva Las VegaStamps ! 

I made a simple card using this adorable whimsical dog image : 

Don't you just love his thoughtful expression.

The dog is stamped directly onto the background with black versamark and embossed with clear embossing powder, then coloured with water color pencils and white paint pen.

But its the background I wanted to talk about today. Anyone who uses acrylic paint or other mediums with a brayer, what do you do with the sheet you roll the excess paint off onto ? When you look at the sheet as a whole it might look as mess, but if you cut it down to card size, it appears quite different. You can see here some scrap papers I had used / background opportunities I had created:

I cut one of the sheets to a card front size, then stamped and colored the dog. The messy/painty paper takes on quite the different look as a background to my focal image. Again I always add a little white detail to any image, it just makes them pop :

 I wanted to ground the image onto the card, but not add anything too imposing.  I masked off the colored dog as shown below and stamped a scenic image over it in grey, I used the water mill scene :

Finally I stamped the 'Why Hello' sentiment and matted the card front onto plain white card stock and onto a black card base.

I think everyone probably has scraps of paper with ink or paint on them, try them as backgrounds before throwing them out :)

Nikki x