Hi there! I’m back again today with another idea for my “Christmas Cards in 20 Minutes or Less” series, this time featuring a gorgeous stamp from Simon Says Stamp called Center Cut Holiday Floral and a fun chalkboard technique that is super easy and quick but adds that extra special touch to create a beautiful Christmas card!
Here’s the video:
Or you can watch in HD here.
One of my favorite quick-but-high-impact techniques is to create a “chalkboard” card. It’s basically some heat embossing with a few extra additions of white. In the video, I talk about adding different values of white, basically meaning different intensities of white to create that white halo left behind on a chalkboard. To achieve this, I utilize a white pencil, white gouache splatters, and some white ink blending around the edges, which totally reminds me of when I was in grade school and the erasers needed to be taken out back (ha) and beaten together to clean them! These different intensities of white help to add to that overall chalkboard look and are quite quick to pop on your card front!
I began by heat embossing the gorgeous Center Cut Holiday Floral with white embossing powder on some Charcoal cardstock cut to 5×7. (Such a large, beautiful stamp deserves to be shown off in it’s entirety!) I then used my white pencil to add some light shading on the larger poinsettia leaves and added a few splatters of watered down white gouache. After the gouache had dried, I added some white blending around the edge using Simon Says Stamp White Pigment Ink and a foam blending tool. After I’d finished all of my chalkboard additions, I die cut the Simon Says Stamp’s Season’s Greetings die twice from white cardstock, then adhered it to the center with some liquid adhesive. The final touch was to add some red “berries” using the Studio Katia Scarlet Red gems to add some extra sparkle!
Well, that’s all for my “Christmas Cards in 20 Minutes or Less” project today. I hope these videos are giving you some useful tips for your last minute holiday cardmaking! We all are so busy this time of year that any little tricks to simplify things a bit helps! Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!