Little Sparrow

I made a batch of Sparrow cards  yesterday and today.  I am trying a less is more look.  There are a lot of  CAS challenges out there with great examples of clean and simple.  CAS poses more of a challenge in getting a beautiful and interesting card with minimal surface treatments than  cards with many layers and interesting items on it.  Since I strive to keep all my cards mailable in an envelope I don't do to many with alot of 3d embellishments.   
The stamping industry has created and developed so many wonderful, beautiful tools and embellishments for this art form it is almost hard to keep up with.   When I started out stamping I had  images -  some of them I cut myself on purchased linoleum tiles and even one from an old sole of a shoe - and an old office type black ink pad.  What this made you do was develop good composition. In the early 80's  rubber stamp sets were starting to appear in stationary, museum and fine gift catalogs, Posh impressions and their wonderful products, especially fat nibbed markers, introduced easy  coloring to stamping.  The 90's brought an explosion of colors and papers, and amazing new stamp companies. The 2000's brought us textures and die cuts and layers and more textures and more layers!
 In my stamping world, I am getting back to basics, better composition and visual impact through less texture and less layering.  I still like layers and textures, but I am not trying to make my cards mini albums.

I used my stamp press for this project, I made 20 of these little birdies, once I got the stamp conditioned and inked properly it went pretty well, after getting 20 good images I racked up only 3 non usable, which I used as testers.

I trimmed out some of the rubber after seeing the  "halo" markings. I used Ranger Archival ink.

 I added my verse, no background or layers, just stamped on the image paper. I used stickels and liquid pearls for the blossoms. The liquid pearl really made the little pussy willow bud pop!

I used colored pencils on the sparrow and the branch and blossoms. I also added brush strokes with gel medium.  One last pearl drop for the eye.

I had originally planned on just a simple layer for the image, But it really was too flat, so I added a white background and then the pink bow.  I stamped an image all over the edges of the background base to bring focus back to the image.  Without it,  again it was too flat. 

 

 

 

 

 

This card didn't come out as simple as I had originally planned but I am happy with it.

 

Mathew 19:26 is a verse that I love.

 In the Text, Jesus is responding to his disciples as to who can be saved.   They are frustrated with the difficulties of working with people.  One of the most important parts of this answer is seldom used and I think it gives the rest of the statement so much more hope.  What Jesus said was " With Men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible"!  What he did was take the burden away from the disciples and from us saying there are just some things we cannot do,but                            He can and He will.

That gives me a great deal of comfort and it is freeing.  It takes the burden of things I can't do but need to be done and delivers them to Him who can do and will do.

We all have things in our lives that we look at every day and think ' how am I ever going to get this taken care of', It is those things that our Loving Saviour delights in making Himself known in our lives.  We just need to turn it over to him, take our hands off the problem and lift them to Him the problem solver.

 

I hope you have a wonderful day and thank you for stopping by!

Ginny M