{Spotlight Project} Maria's Rainbow Goes Awry

How's summer treating you, STAMP friends?  I was having a good ol' time keeping cool in my basement and having lots of ink blending/stenciling fun this month on my blog. I decided to carry it over to my Spotlight projects too. In my last Spotlight I mentioned today's card which totally drove me bananas and which did not turn out at all like I'd hoped. But I'm sharing it anyway to see if you can help me figure out what went wrong!

STEP 1

Gather supplies - Smooth white cardstock, Distress inks, makeup brushes for ink blending, Broken Glass stencil, cool gray Copics and a ruler.

STEP 2

So things started out OK. Flip open the cardbase and secure it. Secure the stencil. I began with yellow thinking it would blend fairly well with all the other colors when I applied them around it. First dilemma, since I had primary and secondary colors I ended up with orange and green next to each other. Suboptimal. A favorite word of mine recently. And one you'll hear often today ;)

If you were going for a rainbow feel using this particular stencil, how would you apply the colors? Stripes? Circles? Haphazardly?

STEP 3

Apply all the colors. Allow a bit of overlap where the colors meet. Remove the stencil.
I probably should have pulled out smaller brushes or daubers to avoid overlap...Suboptimal.
Trim the white off the right edge of the cardbase. Maybe I should have stopped right here.

STEP 4

This is where it got really hairy. Remember the gray Copics? I wanted to add some shadows around those glass shards. I'd intended to do it with a ruler. Then I thought I could make it easier on myself and just offset the stencil and add the first lines with the C1. Tried that. Flipped the stencil away and saw practically nothing. Suboptimal.

And where, pray tell, should the lines even be to achieve "shadows". The age old "where is the light source?" 

STEP 5

Decided I could forget using the stencil offset to make my lines. So I basically took the C1 and colored in all the white space. (photo 1)

Then, with a ruler, I added some lines with the C5 (darkest shade) to the bottoms of the shards imagining a light source at the top left. (photo 2)

And then with the C3 I added lines on the sides of the shards furtherst from the light source, basically on the right sides. (photo 3)

Follow me? No, I wouldn't either. But you can probably imagine my growing frustration as this all went down with SUBOPTIMAL results.

How would you approach adding shadows to the shards considering they are all angled differently?

I used the C1 to go over all the lines and try to blend the grays a bit. Kinda worked but really didn't get the "depth" feeling that I had originally been hoping for. Then I remembered the white gel pen trick for highlights. My Signo Uniball never flows freely (suboptimal), so I ended up using a TippEx pen (what's the word for worse than suboptimal?!?)

Where would you add white highlights? And... what is your white pen of choice?

I quit for dinner and when I came back to it I decided to just plain quit. Maybe shards aren't meant for shadowing....

If you've read this far, thanks. Maybe you've learned how not to do it. And maybe you have some tips for me - I'd love to hear them! 

Broken Glass Stencil


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