Just Three Colours - Our Creative Corner's February Challenge

Servus and welcome back, dear crafting friends and followers old and especially anew!

Time to introduce to you Jenny's (aka Button) challenge over at Our Creative Corner! This month we want you to go for:


"Just Three Colours - use only shades of blue, brown and plum/purple on your project; no black lines accepted!"


This means that not even black lines from stamped or digital stamped images are allowed with your makes. 
I really loved her idea of banning black lines - it makes us look differently at the use of our stamps and ink pads and opens new ways for new designs. Which always is a good thing! 

Actually the brown paper I stamped on changed the stamped on colours ("gathered twigs", "rich cocoa" and "dusty concord") into a darker tone than I had expected - so some of them look rather dark brown- or purpl-ish...which looks a lot "richer in tone" than a black line ever could. So honestly I really like this happy accident ;)

I tried two tags on which I only used Distress inks "broken china", "dusty concord", "chipped sapphire", "vintage photo" (for blending the portraits) and "gathered twigs". 

Using four of these for the wrinkle free distress technique on a piece of white card for creating the background, some of the lighter blues and browns mixed into a shade of turquoise...which I had not thought about but was obvious to happen - and which I really liked... ;)

As most of it was going to be covered up by a lot of layers I decided to use my tag anyway even though turquoise definitely is not just a shade of blue... ;)



 



I finally was able to get the awesome "Dr. Coffin's Apothecary" stamp sheet from Oxford Impressions with a German stamps shop last autumn and the browns reminded me of old labels...so I decided to make apothecary themed tags. 


 On the first tag I accidentally found that the Ranger embossing powder "brown puffs" is exactly the same colour as the kraft paper I used it on - which makes it look even more like real embossing...wow!

  I played around with the gorgeous sewing stamps from Prima and heat embossing with Ranger "rust" and "brown puffs" embossing powders. 

 

Most of the edges of the stamped and cut out images were distressed. Some of the papers I stamped on were first blended with some blue or purple shades of Distress ink and sprinkled with some droplets of water, to give a more aged look to them. 

 

Making two tags at the same time gave me the opportunity to try (and compare) variations of the same technique or colour effect. I guess I will be doing this more often from now on! 


For the two portraits of imaginative "Arthur Coffin" or "Monsieur Routen" I made a copy of two photographs of some of my ancestors. They fit perfectly, don't you think? 

At least they could be doctors as they look very earnest, don't they? 

But most people in old photographs do...maybe because they had to sit still for a couple of minutes to get sharp images....maybe because having a photograph done was a much more important and honouralbe matter in those days than it is now... I often wonder why my ancestors - even the children - looked so dignified when they had their photographs taken...and how it might have been living in their times... with a lot of technical things working much more slowly (or not even invented then). 

 Have you already heard that there's a prize to win each month now at Our Creative Corner?














 All you have to do is enter our challenge with a make that follows all the challenge criteria and our general rules... maybe you will make our winner, Top3 or even the prize win?! Join in and use blues, browns and purple/plum only!




 




 

This month our generous prize sponsor is Nicecrane Designs! 

See you there!




Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia xx