purple postcards

Karen at MMSA is back from vacation, which means swaps are going again - yay! First up is purple. Any subject, just so it's mostly purple. I was surprised at how little purple there is in magazines - until I opened an Oprah! mag, that is. She (or maybe her design team) likes purple! I tore out any bit of purple I could find, grabbed some purple background cards, white gel pen, black gel pen, all my purple gel pens and went to work.

See that background? Those sort of rose-looking shapes? You'll never guess what made those marks. Go ahead, guess. Nope. They were made by the cut off stem end of a cabbage, dabbed onto a purple ink pad. A red cabbage from my garden, in fact. Very cool stamp. There are a few on the bottom card also. Reminiscent of the celery heart rose my S.D. friend Julie showed me one time. 

Gelli print background using a floral stencil. Various magazine elements. Love the question. It was part of some article about what 'normal' means and that it's pretty much different for everyone so don't worry if your normal doesn't quite line up with your sister's or your BFF's. It's *your* normal, embrace it! Unless, you know, it's actually weird disguised as normal. But how would you know? So... maybe it *is* normal. Whatever. Whew...

Same background as above. Lots of purple and silver lipstick tubes, some washi tape, some doodling.

A more restrained application of the cabbage roses, more of those purple-nail-polish-fingers (they were a real find!), some washi tape, more of the little bracelets from #2 above, doodles. 

SOC week 3 lime and purple

I will say this for SOC so far - the colors have been BRIGHT! This week it's lime green and purple. I seem to mostly be making backgrounds for these challenges, and will use them up in various things eventually.

I started out with a lime green painted background, then scraped some heavy gel medium mixed with purple paint thru a stencil but it bled and oozed. :-(  Ugh. But I'll use it for a postcard with something over the smeared areas.

Unhappy with the oozing, I painted a piece of watercolor paper with purple paint, let it dry, then scraped modeling paste mixed with line green paint thru a stencil. Very cool textured background and no bleeding. The thicker modeling paste is the trick.

You can see that there is a bit of color difference between the green squares on the upper 2/3s of the card and the bottom third. The top was done with Liquitex modeling paste, the bottom with Liquitex coarse texture gel. They both have a lot of  texture but obviously absorb the paint differently.

I also scraped a bit of leftover green modeling paste onto the lime card and pressed a stencil into it. That has possibilities.

Great colors, ones I don't use much, at least the purple, but I like them and will use them again. Maybe gelli prints this afternoon??