Altenew Inspiration Challenge - A Pop Art Card

Altenew is hosting their annual Year in Review Inspiration Challenge which I have to say is a very cool idea!


So what does it involve?  Well the instructions taken from their blog post linked above are:

"to take inspiration from one of the past Inspiration Challenge photos and be inspired to create stunning projects! Maybe take the colors, the theme, the composition, or something else from the photo – as long as you get inspired, then it’s fine by us".  

The inspiration images are presented in this  collage: ➡➡➡

So now what?  

Well the first thing that occured to me (probably subconciously inspired by the grid-like presentation of the past challenge photos) was that I had planned to do a grid style project from the recent Coffee Lovers Blog Hop, but ran out of time.  😒

The three colours in each of the past challenge photos further reminded me of Andy Warhol style pop art where the background of each section is one colour, outline of the object is a second colour and background of the object is a third.

It seemed simple enough, but Andy Warhol used silk screen technique so rich, vibrant colours could be layered on top of one other without bleeding and lighter colours could be painted on top of darker ones.

The way I saw it, I had three options:

1.  Heat embossing (with coloured embossing powder) ideally onto a second colour of cardstock and cut out and stuck onto a third colour.  The problem is that I only have neutral colours of embossing powder.

2.  Dye ink image stamped onto white cardstock and coloured with alcohol markers.  This method would have given the vibrancy of colour, but even alcohol markers going over a lighter dye ink can alter the colour of the ink and it would look messy and not give a good distinction between two out of the three colours

3.  Stamp the image in Archival ink onto white and watercolour before sticking onto background colour.  

This is eventually what I did.  

I opted to use Distress Ink as the watercolour since I know it can be successfully layered over Archival, and the changing of the stamped image only happened when the watercolour was comparably dark.

It's far from ideal because watercolour isn't as rich and still looks a bit blotchy.  Maybe if I had used watercolour paper rather than smooth white cardstock I could have worked with it a bit more before the paper threatened to start balling up. 😖😖😖

I wasn't trying to be overly accurate in terms of the direction of the light source, but it was a little bit inevitable since the coverage was not going to be even regardless of what I tried.

The cards actually do look a little better "in real life" from this perspective since either a flash or harsh sunlight seemed to accentuate the issue.

As far as the images themselves went, I was certainly spoiled for choice when it came to images coffee paraphernalia by Altenew.  Unfortunately many were too large to use this technique on and still fit onto a card front.

I picked the dripolator from the Coffee Love stamp set and the tea cup with the lemon from the Tea Time stamp set.  Shaky hands and shortage of time meant I had to omit the lemon and juice drops and just cut out the cup.  😡

I picked 9 colour schemes from the above inspiration photos since I could see either a 2x3 or 3x3 configuration working.  It also depended partly on which ink and cardstock colours I had and how close they were to the inspiration.  I stamped all nine for both images since it was easier and I'd figure out which 5 to choose when I got to that point.

It became a production line of sorts and would work quite well when making a set of cards since multiple images could be stamped with a MISTI (which I might add was invaluable in building up an intensity of colour that made me happy).

With the three leftover dripolators I ended up making a bonus card!  2018 has definitely been a year where I have been trying hard to be more efficient and if I can make one card, I can just as easily do two or more. 

Now it wouldn't be me if something didn't go wrong, right? 😂. Well the sewing machine was acting up (again) and I wasn't planning on adding any extra embellies (shocking I know!), I did end up having to hide a few of the more obvious imperfections create design features. 😉 And let's not forget the text size in today;s post.  I've tried formating it the best I can, but some still doesn't want to co-operate.

Altenew came through once again with the sentiments from Coffee Love, Coffee Talk and Vintage Teacup. 

Well this was definitely an interesting exercise and I'd love to try this style of card again for sure and I'd try different methods to see whether I can get a better result.

Love and copious colourful creations,