Growing In Unity Girl: Day 1 ~ Simple Masking & Dimension

Happy Monday, all!  I am so very excited to be this week's Growing in Unity Girl!!  All week long I will be posting projects featuring the beautiful images of Unity Stamp Co. and at the end of it all, I will do a drawing from the comments for two lucky winners to get some Unity stamps of their very own!!  How is that not the best news???

To kick off the week I wanted to try a technique that I saw on YouTube by the talented Kristina Werner that allows you to get the look of dimension on a one layer card.  I love the look of clean and simple cards but have trouble not reaching for pretty papers and embellishments so this was a good challenge for me.  

Kristina used solid stamps for her design but I chose to use this lovely gal from the May 2014 Kit of the Month at Unity and color her in with Copic markers.  But first, I used Post-It tape to mask off the portion of my project that I wanted to stamp on.  I did the stamping and all of the coloring before removing the mask.  I also use some Pumice Stone Distress Ink to lightly work in some ink over the stamped portion, leaving it darker along the edge of the mask and lighter towards the outside of the piece.  This helped to create the illusion of dimension and make it appear as though the girl is standing halfway behind another piece of paper.

When I pulled up the Post-It tape I loved the look that resulted from this technique!  However, I noticed that some of my Copics had bled under the tape.  Oops!  Since I wanted a crisp line, I used my Signo White Gel Pen and a ruler to cover up any color that had bled outside of the mask.  This is a great trick for making those imperfections perfect again!

I finished up the card with some wood veneer hearts and colored them using my Copics.  I covered them, as well as a few of the balloons, with Wink of Stella and then coated the wood veneers with Ranger Glossy Accents.  I chose to mount the front panel on a white card base with foam tape and round the upper left corner.  This card felt a little mysterious to me and I kind of liked that vibe, so I chose to leave off a sentiment and just let each viewer decide what kind of occasion this card would be good for!

Thanks for visiting on my first day as the Growing in Unity Girl!  Don't forget to leave a comment to be entered to win some fabulous Unity stamps!  See you again tomorrow!