Some Tim Holtz style techniques and masculine cards

I always have a hard time trying to make cards and gifts for guys.  Even when you do a search for inspiration on male-themed cards your returns are standard fare – military, sailing, cars or tools right?  Does a masculine card really have to be limited to  neutral or muted colour palettes?   Are they really loving those golf-themed and fly-fishing efforts? I think we need more guys in our cardmaking circles to give us some kind of direction in the way of new themes for guys.  Luckily for us we have steampunk and grunge to shake up the mix a little – there are after all , only so many times that you can re-interpret a golf-ball image.
I thought that I would share with you an idea that I had for a unisex card.  I got to use one of my favourite paper-altering techniques (inspired by Tim Holtz of course) on it and my favourite hot-air balloon stamps.  I have never actually been up in a hot-air balloon, there is that pesky fear of falling out that I have to deal with – but I have always loved them.  So here it is – my attempt at a somewhat fun, colour-popping card that you could send to a male member of society, with the added bonus of a colour scheme that doesn’t rely heavily on dark muted tones.
 

For the background I used a piece of light blue cardstock, pulled out a bunch of my favourite balloon stamps and used a masking technique to stamp the images.  (NB:  make sure that you masking glue really is masking glue because I didn't use masking glue and one of the masks got stuck to the top balloon and ripped some of the upper layer of paper there).

While the masks were still in position I stamped over the masks with the clockwork machinery stamps in Sepia Archival Ink and then over that I layered some text stamps from a Chiswick collection.  I then used  Distress ink in Salty Ocean, Tumbled Glass and Broken China to add more depth and contrast to the blue background.

 

I removed the masks and used Distress markers and Watercolour Pencils to colour in the balloons – This really made the background pop and contrast.

  Getting the pilot hat right was kinda silly –I took a couple of pictures of myself  in a long-eared beanie with my webcam to give me an idea of how  a 1940’s pilot hat would fit on a head.

   Using that as my blueprint I did a rough sketch on Gimp to make it look more like a Biggles pilot hat and then saved that outline to use as the cut-file on Make-the-cut (MTC from now on).  With MTC you have the option of pixel-tracing a JPEG and it converts into an SVG file ready for cutting on any plotter. I really like using these two programmes together.  If you do a search for Gimp brushes you can get a whole lotta images that you can use as digital stamps.  Once you import those into MTC – you can do some cool print and cuts with those saved files as well.

I used a Ranger product called Ink Refresher.  Tim Holtz demonstrated the potential of this product to create a leather look.  I originally used to use acrylic retarder to get paper supple and oily and leather looking, but I bought a bottle of this stuff to refresh my ink pads and decided to try the leather-look texturisation.  I was surprised – I had not expected it to work, feel and look any different to my acrylic retarder leather-look technique but I have to tell you – this product works so much, much,much better.  It makes the paper feel like soft suede and when you ink it for highlights and lowlights and crack burnishing it takes the ink really well without shredding the paper.  I love it.  To give the hat a little more worn and polished look I painted it with a clear acrylic varnish.

  I played around some more in MTC and drew some goggles and a couple of gears and a cool twirly moustache.

I drew in an eye, nose and mouth to the face and then added some steampunkery to the left side of the pilots face – I cut some of the gears and cogs on the card with regular dies (I think they were from X-cut – not sure now what brand they are because I store them unlabelled altogether)  and I cut the eye glass gears on MTC (you can make your own gears just by creative use of their inbuilt shapes and shape magic tools).  I stuck acetate to the back of the goggles and then poured in goopy White PVA glue and then coloured on top of that with a black permanent marker.

  

I cut out a rectangular frame and embossed that with a couple of different blueprint, industry and cogs and gears folders – I painted over that with gold and black acrylic paint and then ran some brushed pewter distress paint over it to make it look tarnished and brassy.

I die-cut “WILD RIDE” out of the the Alphablock strip die from Tim Holtz alterations and stuck the R-I-D-E on a narrow chocolate popsicle stick.  Excuse the undried glossy accents there.

Here are some freebie cut files in MTC Format if you want to try make this pilot too!  I had to split it into 2 mats - It only contains the SVGs for the eye gears, the face, the hat and the goggles( all in multiple layers so you can stack them for dimension).  You can fully customise the face by drawing it in yourself and the background etc is up to you. If you want these in another format – shoot me a comment and I will see what I can do. 

AVIATOR 1 - background layers

AVIATOR 2 - fiddly parts

Getting in on the Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2013

I have a confession – I am a little bit envious of everyone in the US.   Why?  Because “y’all” can get cool Tim Holtz stuff for next to nothing while I have to save for ages and ages to get one product – the rand-dollar exchange is nothing short of dismal and with our shady national postal service – things go missing regularly.  So in order to get anything Holtzy, I either have to order online from abroad and pay a weeks worth of salary (conversion-specific), and because you have to insure, send via traceable USPS Priority Mail (and their rates are soul crushing) – or I wait until the product is stocked in South Africa often months after the initial release – and then there’s their mark-up on top of all of that.  Not only that – but these products usually arrive at weird times of the month when your wallet is not feeling too fresh and they appear on the stockist site for a millisecond before the stockist sells out. Thus, it is the sad state of affairs that I can usually afford one product a quarter.     
This year I decided – enough drooling – I have to take charge of my desires – I have to own my lustful wants and I am charging forward with a game plan to set it in motion.  What I came up with was that I would try to win some Tim Holtz – I figure entering a competition is worth the challenge…..well that and the possibility of scoring some funderful Holtzy goodness if they would randomly draw my ticket in the Tag Challenge.
All was good and well until I realised that barring an impressive collection of distress ink, stain, and markers – I didn’t actually have a whole lot else of Hotzness.  I have a couple of Movers and Shapers dies, a few embossing folders and couple of shades of distress paint and a bunch of Ranger Mediums.  The order that I put in for a couple of sets of Visual Artistry Stamp sets last year – got lost somewhere via route to me in my quiet little east-coastal village here in South Africa.  And even though I licked my hurting wallet wounds and swore never to put it through such agony again, I gave it one more shot like a trooper and tried to get some off E-Bay a while back – we’ll see how that turns out., still patiently-on-the-verge-of-blind-panic-waiting for any kind of notification that it has got here, even into the country would be a step in a calming direction. 

All these little inconveniences presented to me a problem that I didn't consider - getting in on the 12 Tags of 2013 challenge, would sort of require you to use all the stuff that he was going with – and I didn't necessarily have all the cool stuff – yet (for the next couple of years yet) so this was going to be challenging indeed.  I really wanted to do it though and so I made it a quest to create a personal creative interpretation of the tag posted in this month’s challenge.
What I eventually came up with was truly a test of creative work-around.  I interpreted the challenge  in a way that would be somewhat original, but embrace the basics of the Tim Holtz “sketch” or blueprint.  I didn't have the bunny die, or the foliage elements and I threw out all my tinsel last year after Christmas so here is what I did.  My concept was something whimsical, that included my love of the genre of steam punk and that would work with what I have on hand.  In the process I discovered a handy trick, later on in this post I will unpack that a bit about that. 
I drew the egg-shape in GIMP, traced that image into .SVG on Make The Cut and cut it out of grunge-paper on my cutter.  I distress inked the egg shape and then ran it through the cuttlebug with the sizzix gears folder.  I then ran some Metallic distress stain over the top to pop out the gears.   I then applied a layer of Glossy Accents to make it glossy – who can resist a little gloss right?  I cut the  tattered florals out of aluminium tape that I taped onto lightweight cardstock with the Movers and Shapers mini tattered florals die from Sizzix Alterations. 

Using the gears folder again, I ran it through the cuttlebug and then I used distress paint (loving this stuff) in Fired Brick, Salty Ocean, Chipped Sapphire, Mustard seed and a blend of Dusty Concord and Picked Raspberry.  I made my own version of Kraft Resist Cardstock to cover the background of the tag by stamping and embossing on kraft cardstock and then inked it with Fired Brick, Crushed Olive and Chipped Sapphire.  I cut the tattered banner out of grunge-paper as well and inked it with Old Paper (I think) and Tumbled Glass – I then wrote on an Easter sentiment with a laundry marker – I love laundry markers.  The little wire swirls were a just ordinary wire that I swirled and shaped into the elements that I wanted.
Now comes the crazy discovery that I made – You see the wings, the frame and the little crown – well I discovered a neat trick when trying to get the right proportions for my tag.  I discovered that if you have those physical dies in whatever size they are, you can resize them to some degree.  Here is how you do that. 

• Using your regular die-cutting system like the Big Shot / Vagabond / Cuttlebug etc – go ahead and cut the shape out of black paper.
• Place the shape into your scanner with a white background.  My Scanner has a white background anyway, but for good measure I placed a piece of white printer paper on it.
• Scan and save the shape.
• Open the scanned image in an image editing programme like Gimp / Photoshop even MS Paint will do the job
• Crop as close to the image as you can and then convert the image to black and white. Adjust the sharpness etc if you want. You now have quite a bold digital silhouette of your shape.
• Open MAKE THE CUT and pixel trace the silhouette.  Add that shape to your Mat.
• You now get a passable copy of the die-cut that you can resize to whatever size you need (it is not going to be as crisp and tight and neat as the original die-cut – but it is a fair enough copy.
• I wondered whether this was ethically correct to post this trick that I discovered – but I rationalised it by going – I bought and own the original Sizzix die and all this is doing is like either cutting it down to make it smaller (which I could have done painstakingly with “fairy-sized” scissors or blowing up the shape on a copier and then painstakingly cutting around it.)  The ability to manipulate, trace and cut shapes with MAKE THE CUT just make it heaps less painful.

Anyway I did that with the Mini-tickets and Mini-labels dies to make the frame – I placed the mini-label in the resized Mini Ticket die.  Don't do this with Sizzix images taken off the net though because I think that would infringe the patent or whatever they call that.
The background behind the egg is a piece of an old venetian blind.  I always look out for people throwing stuff away because you find the coolest texture thingies like that.  This stuff is made of a type of material that is almost like paper and almost like cloth – I have no idea what it is – the thrill in this discovery though is that it inks up pretty awesomely.  It takes Distress ink really well, but in this case I used Salty Ocean Distress Paint.
For the second tag, the concept was more storybook-fantastical but steampunky of course.  The elements that I kept from Tim’s original tag were the cut out window that exposes the background texture, the sentiment banner, and the fringe-bottom.  I also endeavoured to keep the look of the lacquered enamel on the “tattered floral” in lieu of the foliage elements.  I designed and cut the grassy fringe in MAKE THE CUT by tracing a royalty free clip-art graphic of a hair comb – I did the old resizing trick with the tattered florals  and wings– as you will notice – the smaller you resize, the less detail you get.  I steampunked the wings and the florals through the cuttlebug.  The little gears were from an X-Cut die-set I think.   I loved the rusty egg effect I was able to get on the egg – it involved painting multiple layers on the egg, sanding bits of it off and then applying some Metallic Distress Stain.  I used crackle accents on the little egg and the “BE”.   I used a lot of Distress Paint on this tag.  The other product that I used on it is Dala Puff Paint, which I then highlighted with Salty Ocean Distress Paint.  Anyway, these are the two tags I came up with for the March edition of the 12 Tags of 2013 Tim Holtz Challenge.  I am still not sure which one  am going to submit, maybe they will let me submit both – I dunno….creating them were fun anyway.