Monochromatic Inspiration

The Inspiration Challenge piece on Splitcoaststampers today is a picture of a monochromatic living room.

I’m not quite sure how I got from this living room to my piece. I was struck by the simple monochromatic palette. Mainly struck as I cannot imagine me having this sort of living space with two cats and a dog…. oh….and a husband that seems to have every type of dirt none to man stick to his shoes. But I was also struck at how interesting the room is with so little contrast. It is very inviting to me. I wanted to create a monochromatic scene using two new images from Rubbernecker-Stamp Oasis collections. One is Flower Girl from the People collection and the other is Aspens from the Outdoor collection. I started by stamping the flower girl on watercolor paper in a light green, masked and stamped the aspens as background in the same color. I used a blender pen to color in the trunks of the trees and the flower stems around the girl. Little by little the images got too blurry. This was caused because of using a water based dye ink that can’t stand up under too much manipulation with a brush or blender. I tried to correct this problem with a little darker color to add back some definition. The girl became totally obliterated but I was not willing to give up. I stamped her again, lightly added color with a blender pen and cut her out to pop up. I wanted to add more definition so I used a crow quill pen dipped directly in reinker to add in some fine sketched lines in the trees, on the girl and on the ground. I used the darker reinker to add texture back to the trees and ground with a small fern stamp. I sponged a pale yellow along the ground area and in the sky to highlight the images and then I popped the girl up over the scene. This is really sort of out of my norm and my husband didn’t really like it. But for some reason I am quite taken to it and although I questioned uploading it decided it was unique and other’s may enjoy seeing it. Hey….it’s all in the ye of the beholder….right!!! Oh, by the way, I posted photographed the card with a separate picture of the tree and girl images so you could see what they really look like.