By:  Linda Selymes, Artistic Guide

Hi again, dear reader.  The first thing I want to do today is fix the little mistake on one of the scenes I already showed you.  Here is the one I'm talking about.  There's a little bit of black ink in the upper left corner.

I could make a lot worse boo boo than that and still fix it, Stampscapes are very forgiving, because it's usually easy to cover a mistake.  I only needed three additional products; a stamp, which is Oak Branch 203G, a medium blue ink like Adirondack Stonewashed by Ranger, and a small cosmetic sponge.

To cover my mistake, and at the same time, frame the top of the picture, I stamped the oak branch partially on the scene three different times; on the upper left, upper right, and top of the picture.  Notice in the photo below that just a small part of the branch is stamped.  The idea is to cover the boo boo and to simulate large trees back where the viewer is, barely visible in the picture.  To finish this sceme, I sponged in some stonewashed blue in all four corners.  This is a neat trick which takes very little time.  When you darken the corners it tends to draw the eye into the scene.   Now this scene is complete, ready for matting and framing or adding to a card. 

For the last scene, I picked a very different kind of sky photograph. There's no suggestion of water, it's all sky and clouds.

First I stamped the two main images, just like all the previous scenes.  But as you can see, it appears that the cabin and the trees are "floating" in the clouds. 

To fix that I need to ground the cabin in water, and for that I will add another stamp.  Using stonewashed blue again, I stamped water pattern-231C randomly several times below the cabin.  I also used black, but after I inked the stamp; I stamped on scratch paper a couple times to lighten the black before stamping it several times without reinking.  Grey ink would work just as well.

The cabin and the rocks still have too much white in them.  There's also still too much white or cloud in the water.  These are the tools I will use to fix that.  

I used a tan Tombow marker to add color to the rocks in the lower right, below the cabin on the shore, and on the cabin itself.  I didn't need to do any shading, because the stamp is so nicely shaded.  Since the sky is fairly bright, I thought the trees needed some green in it; so using a medium green marker by Tombow, I flicked little lines of color into all the trees, both on the shore and in the foreground.   Here, less is more.  You can always add more green, but it would be very difficult to take it out if you got too much.  I just used the very tip on the smaller end of the marker.  I also sponged in a few layers of Adirondack hazelnut brown on the rocks at the bottom right, followed by a little bit of black at the very bottom of those rocks.

The last steps were to trim the picture, stamp the oak branch in the upper corners, sponge a bit more blue in the water and in the top corners, and darken the bottom corners with a light sponging of black.  I matted it on black card stock and taped it onto a 5" x 7" card that I had picked up at Joann's.

This card took about 15-20 minutes at the most to complete.

Now let's take a final look at a photo of  the completed cards from both Part I and Part II.  You can embellish your card fronts as much or as little as you like.  On detailed scenes, I tend to go with the "less is more" concept; because I want the scene to catch the viewers eye and not be distracted by a lot of embellishment.  That's simply a matter of personal preference.

I hope you have found this helpful, and if you haven't tried scenic stamping  you'll give it a whirl.