VanGoghChica Studio

  A favorite past time for adults to relax with is coloring. In this tutorial, I will show you how to use your stamping ink pad to paint watercolor on your cards. And it is just like coloring in that you can easily brush on washes of color with three simple tools - a paintbrush, a paper towel and water. If you would like to see the accompanying video on how to achieve this look, click here .  Supplies Altenew's Nostalgic Florals stamp  and die set White and light orange card stock Altenew's Satin Gold Sequins Altenew's Summer Afternoon fresh dye ink mini set Altenew's Coffee Break fresh dye ink mini set Altenew's Fresh Dye Ink in Grass Field   Altenew's Crisp Inks in  Parrot Altenew's gluetape Liquid glue Altenew's watercolor brush Paper towels Water spritzer Stamp a 4"X5.25" card stock rectangle with your flower image and sentiment. Cut a 4.25"X5.5" yellow card stockout rectangle. Glue the yellow card stock to the front of your A2 si...

  September 19th is the one year anniversary of my emergency hospitalization for cervical myelopathy that resulted in cervical surgery (corpectomy and fusions). Three months after that on December 27th, I again had an emergency hospitalization and that resulted in thoracic spinal sugery (T9-12) You see, my entire spine has sustained a lot of damage over time; to the point that the spinal compression was severe enough for paralysis and fatality. I ended up having two complicated neurosugeries  (cervical and thoracic) over three months.  I am coming up on my one year anniversary of my first emergency hospitalization/surgery. I want to share with you two different art journal entries I created this year about my recoveries. To hear a much more detailed story with visuals, check out my  You Tube video here.  This first page was made five months post op from my cervical surgery. As you can see, I felt stuck, angry and sad. This was most optimistic...

  While those of us who love, love, love Halloween are already crafting cards for our holiday, my topic of masks today does  not refer to those kinds of masks we hide behind at Halloween. I am talking about masks in card making, which conceal a portion of your card so that ink or blending done over that area does not take to the portion covered. This creates depth and a natural look to your composition.  When crafting a mask, you can use specialty masking paper, masking fluid or even a stencil. But I chose to simply stamp and cut out the image I wanted to cover from a post-it. Here, you can see I stamped a monstera leaf, then I stamped and cut out the same image  from a post-it and placed that post-it over my initially stamped image. My next stamped image will overlap the first one and appear partially hidden, under the first stamped image.   Now, do not be scared by my supplies list. I used quite a bit for this card, mainly different inks. You can streaml...

This sweet lil' card is one I would send to book lovers or journalers, etc. The card itself includes the black border. I chose the black border and central image for novelty; but I also saw that stenciling a lavender color over a yellow ombre background produced a sort or lavender/gray. And gray tone lent itself more to black.  Below, you can clearly see the subtle color shifts from light yellow to orange. This was achieved by inking my card with four different shades in the same color family - from lightest to darkest. You can also see how crisp my white ink looks with the help of Altenew's Stampwheel 2.0 (for a You Tube review of the Stampwheel as well as an explanation of how I stenciled this card, see my video here .) Supplies Altenew Journal Flowers stamp and die set Altenew Square Weave stencil Altenew pigment inks in Permanent Black and Antique Gold  and Cloud White Altenew fresh dye ink mini set Golden Sunset Altenew glue blending tool Black and white card...