Playing with Pastels

Hi everyone and thank for for looking in here today.
Well, I am in full swing with my Christmas cards at the moment, but today wanted to play with something a little different.
A while back I discovered a new way of using pastels, you can read about it HERE if you are interested. Well, I decided to use the same technique for my cards and here is the result:

The background was created with the pastels and stamping with embossing ink. These are not pan pastels by the way, but ordinary art pastels. Love how the colours blend and bring out the stamped design. Here is a close up of the background:

For my vocal image I decided to use the Tim Holtz Layered Wing die. I painted them with Fresco in French Roast, then added Crackle Glaze and when that was dry added Snowflake mixed with a little Vanilla and then let the crackle do its magic. Once everything was dry I rubbed some pastel crayon around the edges.

The sentiment was done in the same way, but this time I stamped with Coffee archival which I then clear embossed, The star was covered with sticky embossing powder by ranger and then I added some Rock Candy Distress Glitter

Here is the finished card

While my pastels were out I decided to do a second card, this time the vocal image was a stamp:

The side of the card was run through an embossing folder and then the raised bits were highlighted with Treasure Gold in White Fire.

Here you can see a bit of the background again. The pastel became very intense so I toned it down a bit with watered down Picket Fence Distress Paint.

The vocal image was stamped first and then masked, before adding the background stamping.

I high lighted the branches of his crown a bit with a white pen and added some holly berries with Twinkling H2Os.

I couldn't help myself and just had to add a few embellishments. This time the sentiment was created just with the pastels over the embossing ink.

Well, there you are, two more to tick off my list, - onto the next ones I guess......

Hope you are all keeping creative and getting on with your own preparations, I have seen some amazing cards around and I have to say, I do love this time of year and am determined not to get stressed out.......

Thanks for visiting