Arty Impressions Cat Lady Stamps

I love this stamp set! It's actually a full set of stamps to make a triple fold card, featuring a "cat lady" and all her cats. It's the only Arty Impressions set I have and I am impressed with the attention to detail and quality of the stamps.

You could stamp them directly onto the cardstock but as I wanted to colour them with Copics ( which bleeds through to the other side) I decided to stamp them onto a nice smooth paper and then cut them out. Is that sort of cheating? :)

I've started to collect some prefered colour sets for colouring in various types of cats ( Colours of cats??) and it's handy when colouring my own digi images too. So my current Ginger Tom palette is -
Stripes - YR31, YR23, Y38, E33 and shadows in W1. Eyes in any yellow or green handy, and nose in whatever flesh/pink is to hand :)

I've decided finding other peoples cat stamps that I enjoy using is excellent research for my own enterprise. I quite like having very few details when I'm colouring the cats, but without a bit of guidance where paws or tails might be, it definitely slowed the colouring mojo! I don't like when the stripes are pre-drawn though. Do you?

 Thoroughly enjoyed the process and love the card that resulted (passing it to a friend for her birthday, not selling this one) and it's made me think how I might make some cat "scenes" to stamp in layers of my own.

Additional Birthday Greetings by Hero Arts, "Birthday Messages" CL139


Entered into Crafty Addicts Challenge 2, Spots or Stripes/Anything Goes Am hoping all these stripey and spotty cats will fit the criteria :)

Painting Cards

Had in an order for two "Arty" themed birthday cards for the same person. Tried two new designs with this in mind.

The first, on Kraft Card, was created by masking off an area of the card using post-it notes and then applying media directly to the card. I had a go at heat embossing a cowslip stamp and then layering on gelatos and pastels after. My edges weren't super tidy so I added strips of ribbon either side. 
Greeting stamped directly onto card, whilst " Grandad was printed and matt&layer'd on.

Had a go at this design using some Hero Arts stamps from there Stamp Your Story Brush Strokes set. The colours are all distress inks. I paper-pieced the brushes and added them after.


Made a really cheerful card, which is great for a man's card, they can tend to feel a bit solemn.

p.s. Cowslip Stamp was also a Hero Arts Cling Stamp called Elegant Weeds.