Everyday Expressions

Hi Everyone, and welcome back! Today I have the final card for Altenew Academy, Zentangle For Cardmakers lessons 5 & 6, taught by the amazing Amber Davis of Notable Inc. I have to tell you that not only is Amber an amazing artist, but she is a kind and thoughtful person as well. Do you know that she sent me a big happy mail package of Zentangle goodies; just because I was so excited throughout the class? If you haven’t registered for the class yet, I cannot recommend it enough. I feel like an artist now, and not only a stamper! You can find my previous cards for this class HERE, HERE, and HERE.

I began by cutting a mask from Inkadinkadoo masking paper of the large flower from the Floral Art stamp set, and then stamped the first image onto Strathmore Bristol smooth paper. Next I masked the primary image, and stamped it two more times.

Amber taught several tangles in lessons five and six, and I practiced all of them. However, I only used three new tangles of Vega, ‘Nzeppel, and Pokeroot combined with auras (on the leaves) for this card. Isn’t it funny when you have so many ideas pinging back and forth in your brain, but the final product is completely different than what you originally imagined?

Do you sometimes create something and you think, “Oh, I probably shouldn’t do this, but here I go anyway…”? Yup! That’s me – all the time, and that’s what happened here. I added the shading in the small vine-like leaves, and that looked pretty good. So then I darkened the middle vein of the large leaves. Ugh! I hated this, but I rescued it by coloring the vein a very dark green in the end. (Originally I planned to leave the leaves and foliage shades of gray.)

After coloring everything with artist markers, I shaded the background with WG01, WG03, and WG05, and used a white gel pen to add the highlights to the Pokeroot tangles. Then I drew the Vega with ‘Nzeppel on another piece of cardstock for the edge. Can I tell you my new favorite artsy tools? Charcoal pencils and tortillions! It makes shading so much easier than trying to use alcohol markers, and the depth you get with this shading is amazing! Try them! You won’t regret it!

I took a deep breath, and decided to die cut the You mega die from the colored panel and create an eclipse card. I die cut several from black cardstock, stacked, and glued them together with the colored ‘you’ on top. Then I adhered the panel onto craft foam, glued in the stacked die cuts, and added the top panel to the card base with the tangled border. Next, I found the sentiment, You light up my day, from the Wonderland stamp set, cut the you from it, and heat embossed ‘light up my day’ with platinum embossing powder on black cardstock. Finally, I added some foam to the sentiment for dimension, and placed it onto the card front.

Well, what do you think? This might be my final card for the Zentangle class, but it will not be the last time you find tangles on my cards. I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to Amber for all of your mentoring and lessons. You have helped me transform my artistic style into something so much better than I ever could have imagined! Thanks for stopping by my craftroom today! Love and artsy hugs!

Erin