{Special Post} STAMPlorations at Time Out Challenges

Hello, STAMPlorations friends! There's a new challenge up at Time Out Challenges that STAMPlorations is sponsoring. It's an Inspired by Words challenge:

You can use one or some of the words as the basis for your project. Taking a break from making Christmas cards, I decided to go with a birthday card.

As I was getting ready to start making my card, I remembered a painting technique called "negative painting" -- an alternative painting approach wherein you paint around the object/subject instead of painting the object/subject itself. So I thought about using that technique on my card. I took some liberties with the technique and translated it to stamping -- specifically to my style of stamping.



I love grunge and I love collage stamping so combined with the negative painting technique, I'm calling this stamping technique "negative stamping" -- that is, stamping an image (preferably a large outline stamp) and then stamping around it, leaving the image uncolored.

So for my first negative stamping, I stamped the large daffodils in the center and began stamping around it with various stamps -- big splatters, small splatters and ink blots, background text and postmark -- first in the same ink color as the main image and then I layer-stamped the ink blots and splatters in orange, yellow, and blue, stamping them close to my main image to draw the eye there. I suppose I could have made it easier on myself by masking the daffodils but I wanted the end result to look more free-flowing/organic rather than all neat and clean lines. I finished the card by stamping the sentiment.

Check out the cards that the TO team made here and then come play with us! The winner (voted by the design team) will receive a $15 gift certificate to spend on the STAMPlorations store and another winner (randomly drawn) will receive a goodie bag containing at least $20 worth of STAMPlorations products.

Thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to smile :o)