A Winter Thanks by Heather Telford

With Christmas so close I have now switched to making Christmas thank you cards. It is lovely to be sharing this one with you on the Foiled Fox blog.

Today’s card combines some favorite stamps and techniques to create a frosty winter scene. I started with hot pressed watercolor paper splattered with some masking fluid. When you splatter masking fluid on your paper make sure you rub a little detergent into the bristles of the brush you’re using first. That way your brush will be easy to clean and you can use it over and over.

Once the masking fluid was dry I put the panel in my stamping platform and stamped one of the trees from the Penny Black ‘snowy village’ set in Versafine onyx black on the right-hand side. Even though the paper is hot pressed there is still some texture so it is helpful to use the stamping platform to stamp a couple of times. I also did some partial stamping with the same stamp to extend the black silhouetted ground across the bottom of the panel. I heat-dried the trees as I wanted to make sure there would be no bleeding of black ink once I started painting.

I used the tree stamp from the Penny Black set, ‘woodland beauty’ to stamp some background trees. I inked the stamp with evergreen bough distress ink, wiped some off the base of the tree and stamped it on the left of the panel, I did the same twice more to have three trees on the left. Using the uneven line at the base of the trees as my guide I painted water over the trees to create an uneven horizon line from left to right then added salty ocean stain to the watery area. Working with salty ocean, faded jeans and evergreen bough distress stains I filled the sky with color. The stamped trees became very muted as I painted over them which helped them recede into the background.

I used the same colors to paint a shadow behind another snowbank lower down the panel and added some more color right at the base. To finish off the card I stamped a deer from the Penny Black ‘nature’s friends’ set in black and dried the ink. I am careful to dry pigment inks like Versafine before I do any further painting or stamping as they take longer to dry and can easily be smudged. With all the color and images in place, I removed the masking fluid to reveal the falling snow then added the sentiment from Penny Black’s handy ‘happy snippets’ set.

Thanks for visiting today, I hope you all have a delightful holiday and I look forward to seeing you back here on the Foiled Fox blog in 2018!