Seasonal Scene Building - AECP Level 1

 Happy Sunday, friends!  I hope that you are having an amazing weekend.  We took some time away from the farm yesterday and went and got muddy.  We took our UTV out on the trail with friends.  It was a great day and thankfully, the weather held.  Today, not so much.  

 I digress, though, as this isn't about my outdoor adventures.  Today, I am sharing with you my project for the Seasonal Scene Building course.  This is my last course for Level One of the Altenew Educator Program.  I will have to submit a final project and then I can move on to Level Two. 

I have to admit that I saved this course for last, because I knew it would be challenging and it might take me a while to come up with a project that I was happy with it.  To be honest, I was really intimidated.  I wanted plenty of time to practice, and I am so happy with the results! 

My project is focused on Lesson 1 which covers building a scene on one layer using multiple stamps, masking, and a stamp positioning tool.  I was saving the Altenew Camp Time stamp set for this project, and I had some ideas of how I wanted to approach this.  I knew I wanted a campfire in my scene as so many of my best memories are time spent around the fire with friends and family.  I also wanted to use alcohol markers to color in my images, so I began by swatching my markers to determine the colors I wanted to use.  I ended up not using a few of the colors that I swatched, as I didn't care for them.  That is really the point of the process.  Better to take the few minutes to swatch the colors, than to find that the color pallette isn't what I wanted halfway through coloring my scene and wasting all of the effort. 

Next, I began to design my scene.  I determined what images that I wanted to have in the forefront (in this scene, the thermos and the campfire), and created masks of those images by stamping them on copy paper and fussy cutting them.  I then chose the next image that would be placed (the chair) and created a mask for it.   I almost regretted my decision to use the chair, as fussy cutting it was brutal.  Because I wanted the rocks and grass to show behind the chair, I had to cut out all of the inner areas of the chair frame.  It took ages, as I am the world's worst fussy cutter, but it was well worth the effort.

Once I had my masks ready to go, I began to arrange my images as I wanted them to appear in my scene.  I placed the campfire and thermos images in place on my stamp positioning tool first, as they would be the first images to be stamped.  I then laid the chair in place, followed by the landscape images.  Once I had them exactly where I wanted them to be on my card panel, I removed all but the campfire and the thermos.  Before wasting a sheet of card stock, I practiced  on a piece of copy paper to make sure that I was happy with how my scene looked.  This allowed me to adjust the placement of my images. 

When I was satisfied, I followed the same process, and this time, stamped the campfire and thermos on my card panel.  I adhered my masks using some temporary adhesive and stamped the chair.  I adhered the mask over the chair and stamped the rocks and grass.  I removed the masks and set the panel aside to give the ink time to dry to avoid any smearing of the ink.  I then colored in my images with alcohol markers. 

Once I was finished coloring, I decided there was too much white space, so I added some ink splatters using a few of my grey markers.  I stamped my sentiments from the Altenew Peaceful Serenity stamp set.  Lastly, I trimmed down my panel and adhered it to a black panel, and then to the card base. 

Lessons Learned:

• Swatching is a huge time and frustration saver.
• Taking the time to create my scene on scrap paper, saved me a lot of frustration, as I ended up needing to adjust the image placement.
• This process really required me to think about what I was doing and in what order.  I kept placing my images down in the order that they appear on the card, rather than the order they needed to be stamped in.  

Products Used:

• Recollections 110# Card Stock: White
• Spectrum Noir Premium Ultra Smooth Card Stock:  White
• Black Card Stock
• Altenew Camp Time Stamp Set
• Altenew Peaceful Serenity Stamp Set
• Memento Ink: Tuxedo Black
• Stampin' Up Stampin' Blends (Light and Dark):  Gray Granite, Smoky Slate, Mossy Meadow, Old Olive, Mango Melody, Pumpkin Pie, Real Red
• Spectrum Noir Illustrator Markers:  TB2. TB3, TB4, MB1, MB3, DG1, DG2, DG3, EB2, EB4, EB6, True Black
• Tombow Adhesive

As always, thanks for dropping in!  Happy stamping!