Stamping heaven

Saturday finally arrived and I drove down to Ashford in Kent to attend the 1 day Lili of the Valley colouring day. You can see some extra photos on the post I have linked to. I had been so looking forward it.  This was essentially a "master class" for learning tips from the experts (Bev and Jacqui) on how to colour stamped images used in paper crafting.  Now I have several great blogging friends in the States who are the most talented artists (hello Michele, Linda, Bethanie, Shirley et al !) and I marvel at the images they produce. I however, have the colouring talents of a child, I joke not.

Well what a day it was....absolutely brilliant. I will show how I achieved this but just look below at one of my end results.....

The venue was the Ashford International Hotel. My drive took me about 1 1/4 hours and when I arrived I found the room set up with tables sitting 6 work to on. 40 lovely ladies had enrolled for the day. As in the blogging world there are such kind, friendly people out there in the card making world and everyone was genuinely so looking forward to the day.

There was a little shop set up next door to the working room with all the stamps, markers etc for sale. What was even better was that we were given 10% off all our purchases that day.

We were all given a great goody bag with lots of crafty treats in to take home with us.

The shop set up

The shop was open all day so there were lots of opportunities to part with our money. Lili of the Valley produce the most lovely stamps and we were even given a sneak peak of the new summer range being released in a few weeks time.
After meeting and greeting we went to start the class.

Each place was set up with a stamped image. The first we tried was a fairly simple image of a Christmas teddy. We all had an outline stamp of the teddy which had been stamped onto white card. The talented tutors Bev and Jacqui  showed us how to build up the colours and blend them. At first I felt quite nervous at doing this but it was incredible to see how it works.

This was my first image. He is not that great but for a first effort I was more than pleased. I regarded him as my test piece where I was learning the techniques of shading.

We then moved onto a slightly more complex stamp which was a boy themed stamp shown below.

Here I have started to blend his skin tones. We then worked through adding colour to his little boat and then to his clothing.

And here he is all finished. I started to understand more about making images appears more rounded by also using oil based pigment pencils to finish off. These made such a difference and really made the image start to jump out of the page.

All this work made us hungry so then it was time for a well deserved lunch break. We had an excellent lunch provided by the hotel. After lunch it was time to move on to some more complex images and the first we worked on was a boy and girl "love" image.

We worked through blending the flesh tones, clothes and the tree in the same way as we had with the other images. It was fascinating to see the images gradually come alive.
It was also interesting to see how different everyone's final images looked, every person had a slightly different end result despite using the same colours to work with. We all had our own colouring "personalities".

Below are the stages I worked through...

......until I had completed the final stage. I really love this image and in fact I bought this stamp as I will be able to use it in my card making for lots of occasions..Valentine's, birthdays, anniversary......

By now we were all getting a little more confident with our colouring skills and the last image we worked on was a really sweet fairy.

                                                     I really think she is such a cutie!

 So there we are, my day's work and I now have 4 gorgeous images to make up into some cards. I shall keep you "posted" as to when I have made cards using them and I will show you the end results on my blog. I may even start adding some of these cards to my Etsy shop. I also now have the confidence to apply my colouring skills to all the other stamps I already own.

I will enjoy being able to bring my stamps to life in a way that, up until now, I never could. It really was a day spent in stamping heaven.

Bye for now,

Jane x