Landscape with Silhouette

Hi everybody.  I have a friend's birthday coming up and I usually end up doing a pretty flower or two, but this time I decided to use this silhouette stamp from Chocolate Baroque called Baroque Meadow.  I was going to do just a loose wash to roughly represent sky and greenery, but as quite often happens I get carried away and end up not knowing when to stop....lol, and it turns into a full scale much more detailed background.

I started with a piece of white card about 6" square and stamped the Baroque Meadow silhouette using Versafine Majestic Blue ink heat embossed with WOW Clear Gloss Embossing Powder.

I have some new Derwent Art Bars, just a small set of a dozen colours, which I got in a sale, and I am quite happy with them.  You can take them straight to the card like pencils and the more you apply the more vivid the colour when water is added, and you can move it around with a brush, but I nearly always use just a waterbrush.   You can also just take the colour straight on to the waterbrush from the bar and then you get a softer finish, and the same thing applies when mixing, I usually brush the colours on to my glass mat and then mix together.

I applied the main colours for sky and grass, i.e. a couple of blues and a yellow and green, by using like a pencil, and then I just washed  it across the card.  I then bleached bits of the sky with some water and lifted it with a piece of kitchen towel, and added some of the peachy shade taking the colour on to the waterbrush straight from the bar.  I then decided to have some distant foliage and trees for which I used some green mixed with brown and black, and then behind that I decided to add some hills and I introduced some more blue and pinky purple for them.  I then added some more darker tones in the foreground with green and brown and a little more of the peach in the middle distance.

I die cut the scene with a stitched square die using a set from The Works and then with the largest size die cut the dark green layer behind.

Finally I used some repositionable adhesive to place the topper before sticking it permanently, so I could stamp the sentiment in the right place.  This was stamped using the same Majestic Blue heat embossed with WOW Clear Gloss EP.  I then mounted this on to an approximately 6" square white card.  I then decided to add the three little birds and debated whether to use a micron pen or the art bar and a little water.  I didn't want them to be too distinct as they are very distant but looking again they are rather smudgy, so perhaps the pen would have worked better.  I hope I haven't bored you all to tears by going into quite a lot of detail, but I understand if you felt you had to skip to the end, or cut to the chase, or whatever...lol. 

Thank you for visiting today.  I have been blogging for four years now, in fact my first post was on the 11th September 2013, and I have just reach 50,000 page views which is very pleasing.  I appreciate every single person who takes the time to come and visit me and hopefully leave a comment if they have time.  I enjoy every minute of it and hope to be able to do this for a long time to come, and that we can continue to make the journey together.

I am entering the following challenges:

CAS Watercolour September Challenge - Silhouette. 
CAS Mix Up September Challenge - Watercolour Wash.  (As well as the stamping and watercolour wash I have used die cutting and heat embossing)
Simon Says Wednesday Challenge - Clean and Simple.
Artistic Stamper September Creative Challenge - Take a little Colour.
Happy Little Stampers CAS September Challenge - Silhouette.
Addicted to Stamps and More - Clean and Simple.
The Daily Marker 30 Day Coloring Challenge - run by Kathy Racoosin it aims to get people to colour something every day for the whole month, or as often as you can.  In my case I will probably not have time to do something every day, but hopefully a few times during the month.

I do find it hard sometimes, even when reading the rules, to know whether something is clean and simple enough for a particular challenge.  I have added a mat but apart from that there are no extra embellishments and there is some white space, so hope this is OK for those challenges.