Crafty As L

Spurred on by the results of my creative cans upcycling project a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d do a similar thing for my paintbrush pot, which started out life housing pork scratchings!   It was a first outing for the stamp set, Colorado Craft Company’s Color My World from their Big & Bold range, which was part of my COTY2022 prize.   I was inspired by this fantastic card by My Love For Paper, who also has a great video demonstrating her colouring. My colouring skills are not a patch on hers and I doubted that I could make the brushes look that realistic so I went for black stamped and clear heat-embossed lines rather than the no-line look on her card.   The panel is 14cm x 36 cm, long enough to wrap around my pot. To begin, I coloured the handles and ferrules using alcohol markers.   I realise the irony of colouring paintbrushes with markers and pencils but I didn’t have any watercolour paper that was long enough. Next, to add more definition, I...

One of my fellow Visible Image DT members, Jane, recently showed her upcycled storage cans which she had decorated with stamps.   My blending brushes were stored in a motley collection of jars and cardboard boxes so I decided to revamp their storage following Jane’s lead. My cans were Heinz tomato soup, but I think they’re mostly the same size.   I cut some 160gsm paper to 4” x 9⅛” and went through my VI collection of stamps to find suitable ones to use.   Most of them, as it transpires!! Well, I’ll need more cans so that’s not a problem!   To start, I made the backgrounds for my wraps.   Fearless Tiger was going to feature on the first can so I opted for a background of yellows and orange. To give a stripy texture that wasn’t actually stripes, I used one of my favourite stencils, Graffiti, and stencilled with orange and red.   The card was quite wet then so I set it aside to dry and started on wrap #2. For this can, I was going for an underwater ...