Art Journaling with Dylusions Stamps

Hello Crafty Friends!

Danni here today to blog my first DT Tutorial with Crafter's Cupboard.  A tad excited I might add, and hopefully you'll find it inspiring as well.

Unfortunately I have been tied up with work this month and haven't been able to get down to the Awesome Crafter's Cupboard shop to check out all the lovely new releases from Paper Artsy.

You can check the new releases here. I cant wait to get my greedy little hands onto some of those exciting new stamp plates and the wonderful range of paints. Till then, I will have to make do with my last purchases at the Crafter's Cupboard which were a few of Dyan Reaveley's Dylusions stamps.

I 've been pondering over them for quite a while. I would say that they have been calling my name every time I enter the Crafter Cupboard shop, but they are just a little out of my comfort zone so I had been resisting them.

Last month I found myself in front of Angus's perfectly arranged shelf of the Dylusions stamps, and once again wondering what I would create with them. So, this time I bit the bullet and brought a few sets home with me!

Believe it or not, todays post is all about these wacky and fun stamps. I managed to create a fun double journal page and I quite surprised myself with the finished project.
Now I know there was quite a few Dyan Stamp set's left on the shelves at Crafter's Cupboard shop that I will now most definitely need to get!

So my journal page started as they all do -  blank. I picked a few stamp sets that I wanted to play with

Bits of these -DYR34605, Ruby Rainbow-DYR34377, Shrooms-DYR44529

And I had a few more stamps on standby just in case .

 Next was to pull out my Dylusions spray's -  another product that's a little bit out of my comfort zone, but that I am pushing myself to use as I quite like the effects.

 Once colours were sorted, I grab my handy dandy spray booth - a chips box from Aldi

 ( a wonderful tip I got from Jennifer)

and sprayed to my hearts content also adding a water spray over the top to help with the blending of the colours

Once I was happy with the coverage on my pages I whipped out a stencil

as I wanted to give ghosting a try.

 This is a method that Dyan is well known for when using her Dylusions sprays. It involves spraying your background, placing your stencil down and spraying water through the stencil. This causes a reaction to the dylusion inks so when you lift your stencil and dry the area with paper towel you are left with a ghost print of the stencilled image.

as seen here

This was a really cool technique that I would try again . But next time I will make more of a feature with the technique.

The next step once the page was completely dry was to stamp the little flower stems from the elements of Shrooms-DYR44529 stamp set with archival ink.

and then using other stamp elements that come from the stamp sets to compose my lay out

Once I was happy with the overall lay out it was time to try another technique!

I had been hanging out to try this one which involves colouring with aqua painters.  I filled each one with the Dylusion ink sprays straight from the bottle so that I could use them to colour my stamped images.

The colours are so vibrant and are not watered down so you can get direct colour into small paintable areas

Once all the images were coloured, I stamped out the crazy little bodies and heads, mix matching from one stamp set to the other onto 300gsm water colour paper.

 I then used the aqua painters to again colour the images up.

 

For the skin tones I used my copic makers E50, E51, E53 and E93

Once they were completely dried, I fussy cut around the stamped images using a craft knife for the really small areas.

The larger figure  needed hair as her head finished at her eyes. I had contemplated using the leaves but that would have just gotten too busy with the leaves that were already stamped around the boarder of the pages.

So another dig through my stamps and I pulled out

Dyan's Surivor- DYR44550 ...

and stamped the survivor head straight down onto the journal page

I then proceeded to matt medium the fussy cut stamped images down onto my pages

Once they were in position I felt the page needed a bit more black as the bright and intense colours were a little too overwhelming.

Another dig around in my stamps and I found Clearly doodle parts 

which has a few solid leaf stamps.  This was stamped around the boarders of the page to frame the figures and to also pull all the colours together.

 I actually think the extra black on the page makes the Dylusion inks pop

So now nearly finished … .. I used a posca fine paint pen to make highlights on the leaves and to put a Dottie pattern through the hair of the larger figure and

then finally, using another  Dyan stamp- Clearly quotes 

(Who Knew I had so many sets!) I stamped out two quotes that I liked and thought were appropriate for my images.

 They were stamped onto white cardstock and then I cut them out and used matt medium glue them to the pages…..

and voilà  a finished double spread.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial as much as I enjoyed making it

if you have any questions please leave a comment I would love to hear from you

Until next time enjoy what you do and keep on creating

crafty hugs xxx

Dannii

Danni - We just LOVE what you have done with these stamps ! Great techniques that you have shared and I'm sure our readers will be itching to try them out - we certainly are !

Love the finished result - the colours are so vibrant and a great tip to use the inks in aqua pens for colouring to keep those vibrant colours in the characters as well as in the background page. Well done, and thank you from the Crafters Cupboard team