PaperArtsy Is The Bee's Knees….

                             Design and photograph World © Lyn Wilkinson - All rights reserved

Firstly I have to apologise for this post going out later tonight that I said it would on Tuesday's post, but we have been very busy bees (I know, I know, not a great joke). 

We have lots of lovely suppliers at Craft Boutique at 84 and PaperArtsy is no exception. As you can see from the photograph above, they produce great products for all craft projects, working in conjunction with some great designers. 

The newly released A5 JOFY rubber stamp set from PaperArtsy, JOFY Collection 30 is so much fun to work with. Designed by Jo Firth-Young it contains nine stamps individually trimmed on EZ mount. I wanted to try out the new postcard tags (available in manila and white) that we are now selling in the Wanstead shop and online. I used the honeycomb stamp with a Versafine 'Vintage Sepia' ink pad, to create the background and then combined that with one of the text stamps which I stamped using Rangers Archival 'Watering Can' and lastly added some of the smaller bees using a Rangers Archival 'Jet Black' ink pad.

I then stamped the larger bee, beehive and both sizes in the honeycomb stamps. Then I coloured them in using  some of the PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Acrylic paints. I used 'Tango' and 'Yellow Submarine' to colour the bodies of all the bees, 'Chocolate Pudding' and 'Brown Shed' for the beehive and a mixture of 'Pumpkin Soup' with some other shades of brown for the honeycomb pieces. I applied all the paint using a water brush, which at the moment is my favourite way of working with the paint to create shading.

I cut out all the images I had stamped, covering the  large honeycomb shapes in Rangers Glossy Accents giving them a shine to contrast against the smaller shapes. Finally I used STIX2 foam pads to create a 3D effect and stuck all of my cut outs to the postcard tag.

I was really pleased with the finished tag, I had been wanting to use Jo's bees for a few weeks, so was finally excited to be able to do a project. It reminds me that Summer is on it's way!

I hope you have enjoyed tonight's project, look out for some exciting posts over the next few days.

Dan