Umbrella Man

In honour of this rainy bank holiday that we're having in the UK, what better way than to show off my latest card using Tim Holtz's fabulous range of products! As some of you know, I am a huge fan of Tim Holtz and his style of crafting and to make this card, I used most of his products and hope that I've done him proud!

So, where do I begin? I took a piece of white card and using various colours of Distress Ink and a blending tool, I built up the colour to what I wanted. I then spritzed the card with some water and also flicked some water droplets across, to give the effect of rain. If you have time, you can set it aside and let it dry naturally but I dried it with heat tool. Once dry, I started to build up my stamped images, layering one on top of the other, in different colours of Distress Inks and Archival Ink, to give a collage effect. I used Black Soot ink around the edges and then set this aside. The background paper is some that I printed off from the Men's Sport and Travel CD Rom from The Crafthouse Press, cut to size, aged the edges for a grunge feel and then matted onto a card blank, together with the image. As finishing touches, I used white paper Petaloo flowers, which I stamped on with a script stamp and once again, aged with inks. I then popped a large eyelet from WRMK into the centre of each flower and scrunched them up slightly so that the petals looked less static and more realistic. Finally, I added the decorative swirl...which is from Tim Holtz's Grungeboard ~ Plain Elements Shapes. I painted the element with a metallic bronze crackle paint and this, once dry, gives the most amazing crackled effect and is the perfect finishing touch to the card.