A Bit of Crafty Genius: Inking and masking and stencils and playing.

I've been creating and designing masks and stencils again. I have to say I have rekindled my love of photoshop. Unfortunately it's been sort of a hate relationship as well, though not with the program but with my computer. It is the. Slowest. Thing. In the world. I would love love love to be able to afford a new Mac, because of all the lovely graphics capabilities. My only problem is... I can't stop buying my crafting goodies long enough to save up properly for one!! How anyone can go so long without new inky stamps goodness to play with is beyond me.

Anyway, I have managed to combine my photoshop abilities with my crafting abilities to make some exciting (for me) new things to play with. You already know about the stencils and the masks. But recently I was asked to cut out a sloth... Can I find a sloth cut file anywhere?? No. Can I find a sloth image to cut? Not. So what do I do? I drew it. Yeah, go me! Not only did I draw it. I scanned it, altered it, cut it, painted it and glued it together!

Eee! He is so cute! I really like how he turned out.

I have also created a few new masks/stencils to play with. I made this pumpkin set and I love it! Here is what I managed to create with it so far:

Yup, back at my typical fall colours! I can't get enough of them. You will probably be seeing both the colours and the pumpkin a bit more.

One last make to share with you. I recently bought this lovely indigo blue stamp and I received it today, so of course I have to try it out. So I stamp it with stazon onto my tag, break out the distress inks and start water colouring it using my new water brush my mother in law gave me. It had a bit of empty space in the edges so I used one of my stencils, distress inked over and sprayed it with a gold shimmer water to make it blend in as a watercolour effect with the test of the image. Stamped on a sentiment and there you go! I'm very happy with it.