The African Adventure Begins....

Hello Folks,

Tonight, I am starting to show you the cards I made for the fantastic African sets of stamps and stencils which were on the last Clarity shows on Hochanda.  I was delighted to get these and enjoyed working with them.  Some of you may know that I have a fb friend in Kenya, who sends me little hand painted pictures which I make into cards, so I had a good lot of inspiration for these stamps.

I thought of the idea for stamping through a map of Africa almost straight away, so I printed a map onto copy paper and cut it out, leaving an African shaped aperture.
I inked through it with red, orange and yellow distress inks, with some black towards the bottom. I placed the giraffe skin stencil over and added a very light brushing of black ink.
I stamped the Mums and Babies animals with black archival, then drew round the edge of the map with a fine pen.
Now, if I'm honest, I was going to leave it there, it looked good - BUT! I had smudged some ink outside of the map, the ink had gone through the copy paper!
so I decided that I wasn't going to do it all again (it had already gone wrong once before and this was my second go!) and I had to find a way to cover it.  Bring on the Giraffe stencil!  I covered the map with the inny bit I'd cut out and lightly sponged orange and black ink through the stencil, covered my smudge splendidly!  The Masai warrior and his lady, just fitted perfectly in the gap.
Finally, I added a double line round the edge of the stencil and coloured in the gaps.

I have to show you some of my Kenyan friend's cards... these are little hand=painted pictures and I love them..

and this was the one that gave me the idea for the map...

Wonderful, aren't they?

Thank you Robin

The stamps/stencils used for my card:

Safari animals

African set

Savannah stencils-Giraffe spots

Thanks for visiting, hope you had a great weekend!

Janet xx