First card challenge for 2017... and a little tutorial :)

Hello there :)

Just recently I was browsing around the internet and I stumbled across a really cute stamp set from Gerda Steiner Designs.  I had never heard of this particular company before so I did a little more browsing around and found two stamp sets that I just couldn't resist. 

My stamps arrived in the mail a few days ago and then yesterday I was having another look at their site and stumbled across their 'Share your Designs' challenge.  All you have to do is share your design created with a GSD stamp and you could win $15 Store Credit. So I figured I'd give it a go:

  Here's a look at my finished card for the challenge... I'm super pleased with how it turned out:

I decided to take step by step photos of the stamping and colouring process so here goes:

I started off stamping a few of the little ducks, some reeds and the water lily.  I also heat embossed all of the images as I went.

Next I masked the lily flower so that I could add a lily pad and I also stamped the underwater duck's head and a tiny fish.

Then I made a mask for the reeds so that I could add a couple more of them along with a nosy little dragonfly... super cute! 

After doing all the stamping I decided to cut out my panel with my stitched rectangle dies from Lawn Fawn.  I kind of had an idea of how I wanted my finished card to look and I knew the stitching would look cool.

Before adding my background colour I applied some masking fluid to all of the images.  I love doing this technique because it's actually super simple and always has great results.

Since my little ducks were supposed to be sitting on the edge of the pond I added some 'sand' to the card with Scattered Straw Distress Ink and a wet on wet technique.

Then I added water by colouring with Salty Ocean and Mermaid Lagoon Distress Inks.

Since the duck family were at a pond I decided to do grass up behind them as if they'd just walked through a field.  For this I used Mowed Lawn and Twisted Citron Distress Ink.

While the masking was still in place I used some of my Zig clean color markers to add some extra details like some depth to the water ripples around the duck with 034 Dull Blue.

Then I added some more 'grass' with 041 Light Green.

Next came the exciting step of removing all the masking fluid... I LOVE doing this stage!

Now it was time for the really fun stuff... adding all the colour!  I went back to 041 Light Green to colour the lily pad.  I'm finding you can add lots of depth by blending with the water brush, drying it off with the heat gun and then layering on a bit more of the same colour... great effect!

I used three colours on my gorgeous wee water lily 024 Wine Red, 021 Light Carmine and 026 Light Pink.

Then it was 040 Green and 047 May Green to add the leaves to the reed plants.

The reed heads were done with 060 Brown.

Next came the gorgeous wee ducks using 050 Yellow and 052 Bright Yellow.

For the ducks beaks and feet I used 060 Brown and 061 Light Brown.  I also used these colours to colour the dragonfly's body.

The wee fish was coloured with 070 Orange.

For the wings of the dragonfly I used 083 Lilac.

One of the little ducks had his tongue showing so I coloured it with 025 Pink.

I finally had all the colouring done and I have to say that I was super pleased with how it all turned out.  The more I use my Zig markers the more I like them!  I decided to stamp one of the sentiments from the Lucky Duck stamp set onto the top of my card and heat emboss it.

Then it was time to make my card.  I layered my stamped and coloured card front with kraft cardstock and then layered that onto a plain white card base.

Here's my finished card:

Thanks so much for visiting my blog today xx