More on Combining Efforts

The place where it all began was on OSA, Oriental Stamping Art. Side note: I found out about OSA because of my friend Brenda Marks, who's branched off from stamping into her own stuff, which you can admire at http://www.brendamarks.com/ (I'm particularly enjoying her embossed pastels right now). Anyway, Asian art has always been a fascination of mine, and stamping in a westernized Asian style has fit me to a "T" (bad pun alert, sorry... ;). Now that I've started delving into digiscrapping I'm exploring a more Western style--my family and I are unfortunately way too white to fit, photographically, with a lot of Asian-style layouts (though I do try and sneak it in, of course! *lol*).

But (I was going somewhere with all this, I promise), I can combine techniques, and reuse what I make for stamping with what I do in digiscrapping. Who knows--eventually maybe I'll be able to make stuff commercially, too! In this case, I'm referring to this card, which I made for the OSA ACE9 round for January (ACE=Asian Card Exchange; you send 3 cards a month rotating down a list until you get back to your own name):

(Pine Bough by Stampendous, Winter kanji by Art Neko, punched branch by McGill)

The background is a piece of 8.5" x 8.5" white column cardstock that I distressed with sanding paper, an embroidery needle, and the sharp point of my X-acto knife, then covered with blue dye ink and silver pigment ink. I added the darker inked edges after I cut up the paper (I made 4 cards of this style), but I'll have to do another like it--love the effect, and it would work great for a photo frame in digiscrapping. I scanned the larger square piece. Now (with a bit of fiddling in the contrast area) I have a great grunged overlay that I can use!

I can foresee a lot more of these stamping/digiscrapping combos coming down the line... ;)