...Monday morning make - a Technique Challenge

So I'm thinking Monday seems like a good day to make something and I fancied making it into a little challenge because I like the company....

Popping through the waltz projects the other night I was so inspired to try so many different things, but one stand out technique is this chalkboard look that I see around a lot on Pinterest. I suppose it's inspired by cafe boards and the like.

So, Just for fun I'm throwing out this challenge - I have made up my sample today in the Chalkboard style and I have a few hints and tips below on how to achieve this look.

I want you to have a go with me and see what you can do in the chalkboard style. I do ask that you use WMS on your project in some shape or form and if you don't have WMS stamps we have freebie templates here at the store, you could try jazzing one up!

I'm going to leave the challenge open for a week and I'm going to pick a random participant to win a £20GBP gift code for the store!

I hope you can join me!

Link your  challenge entries at the end of this post!

But first some tips... I'm using black card obviously and I rubbed it with a little embossing buddy that my pal Suezie made for me - you can just see it peeping in at the top there, but there's a better pic underneath (here is Suezies blog post about these little baggies). It's a little baggie of magical dust that stops the static in the paper from attracting the embossing powder - and it gives a much cleaner result as the powder only sticks to the Versamark, or whatever ink you chose to emboss with.

I started with my sentiment from Compact Sentiments Part Two - I stamped it in Versamark and then sprinkled over some white embossing powder.

Then I added some flourishes from  Flourishes Scallops and Dots and a heart from My Heart. I used the heat tool to set it all.

Then go back in with your stamps and stamp everything again with a white ink - I used PTI fresh Snow. It's a good idea to slightly offset the white stamping to give that rough chalk drawing effect.

Next thing to do is take a little scrap of cloth or paper towel nd just rub some white ink over the card - I practiced on a scrap of black to see how this would look and when I was happy that I knew the amount of ink I needed to pick up on the cloth, I rubbed it onto the stamped image.

You really don't need to be too careful, the key thing is randomness here I think. You can go in with some more stamps at this point and add some more design elements in the plain white ink - I added a few more swirls, it all helps to give the image a little depth.

Next thing to do is head for the lair of your closest school age child and search for a white coloring pencil, it'll only take you about a half hour per square foot of bedroom, and you might hit lucky and locate one in the first square foot....you can use this to add border lines or maybe some doodles.

When you are done it is just a matter of mounting your creation on a card front, simple pimple.

If you are like me and hang out at all the cheapo bistros you will often see that they use coloured chalk on their boards. This is so not the 'done thing' at those up market joints...no, this is more of a  'low brow' thing to do, but I thought it might be a little fun to add some colour to a few chalkboard samples....

I used a copic marker to add colour to my chalked images - now, don't split on me to the likes of Debbie Olson or Beate, those gals might spin on their heels to see what this does to your marker, and I really don't recommend it for large areas, but I just added a few highlights and quickly doodled some on a piece of scratch paper to remove the embossing residue that gathered on the tip of my copic... it was grand.

Made a little taggy, loved this one, handy things to have lying around for last moment gifts, and we are all about the last moment in my house...The image is from Labels 18 - I just didn't ink up the two dotted lines on the fancy label - the sentiment is from My Heart.
 

And finally I went all cheap and cheerful - even 'street market' with this one...but hey, it was fun! It's the largest image from the Labels 18 set and a wee sentiment from Compact Sentiments.

So, let's see what you can do!!

Link your entries here - You have until 2;00PM GMT next Monday 28th!