Mid Week Blog Series #4 - Masking technique

  Hello and welcome to my mid week blog,

These mid week blogs are designed to be shorter than my Sunday blogs so that I can share techniques, card designs or other tips and tricks with you. This week I will show you how to use masking when stamping so that images can appear to be in front or behind of other images. It's not as hard as you might think but it does give your projects depth & more of a 3D effect.

Here are some examples......

To achieve the appearance that images are layered on top of each other you need to be able to block out some parts of stamps. The quickest & easiest way of doing this is to use the humble Post-it note! 

1. First you stamp the image that you want to appear at the front onto your cardstock.

2. Next you stamp it again onto a post-it note, making sure that the image is at the top of the note so the sticky part can be used. 

 

3. Cut around the post-it note image.

4. Place the post-it note over the first image & using the 2nd image stamp, the one you want to be behind the front image, stamp over the first image.

And that's it! Here's some pics of the post-it notes I've used over the last few months on some of the cards above.

I masked the flower on the Delicate Dahlias card so that the leaves would be in the background.

 

I used the larger flower of the Poinsettia so that I could layer the petals without having a big stampy mess. I used both of the petal layers so that I could add the leaves behind the flower.

 

For the presents in the Textures & Frames card I used the rectangular outline so that I could stamp presents behind others. I used the solid cut out when I wanted to stamp a box around the present.

I hope you enjoyed learning about this simple but effective technique to achieve more depth to your cards. I would love to see what you make using the Masking Technique so please drop me a line or post on my Facebook page at Crafted by Alison.

Next week I'll show you how to make an 'Envelope' card.  Thanks for visiting. Hope you can come back!

XX Alison