Guest Designer- Jess!

Happy day! I'm thrilled to be back again for another guest designer post on the Brutus Monroe blog! Today, I'm sharing a card featuring a whole boat load of Brutus Monroe products... see what I did there?

Okay, let's get into it! I'm going to share a little secret with you - this card started out as a background gone horribly wrong. I masked off my whole card except for a circle area at the top and used embossing ink and powder to heat set the Pipe Background stamp in that circle area. I had the idea to ink blend over it with the 'emboss resist' technique, so I'd get a cool spotlight effect. Then I decided to take it one step further and use the Folkwave Stencil instead of just ink blending by itself. This is where things when wrong. I did a cool ombre blend with a few different blues, but you couldn't see the pipe design at all because of the open space in the stencil. Whoops! I sat there trying to think of how I could save it, and almost scrapped it a few times. But I didn't give up!

I started experimenting, and this is where the magic happened. I grabbed a few Copic markers and just started scribbling over my design. It looked horrific, but I just kept going. I added a few layers of different colors in a totally random pattern and it started to look better. I was starting to see the pipe design, finally! I wanted to focus the scene on the center of the card, so I did some ink blending around the edges with Chipped Sapphire and then came back with another layer in Black Soot. I thought it needed a little something extra, so I snagged the Botanical Banners set and some VersaMark ink in Onyx Black. I stamped the gorgeous floral image in the bottom left and upper right corners. I also added a tiny compass rose stamp I had on hand in the upper left corner. My card needed a subject, so I grabbed the True Love - Sailing set and got to work on my coloring. I used Copic markers for this and then fussy cut the stamped image. I cut a circle from vellum to give my little sailors a bit of a spotlight and then mounted them on foam circles for some dimension. I mounted my card front on to a white A2 card base and finished it off with some clear droplets to give a bubble effect. What do you think? Do you keep going when you make mistakes in your projects or do you get discouraged and throw them out? I hope this post inspires you to try to save your 'mistakes' and make something awesome out of them! Have a great day all!