Bookmarks XIII: The Mage Wars

This week's challenge at Simon Says Stamp & Show is to "Read All About It": make something using text or books, or inspired by them.

I pretty much always make bookmarks when I papercraft, and that seems pretty book-related to me, but I figured that was rather less effort than the challenge designers were expecting. So I made some bookmarks specifically to go with a trilogy of books.

Let me just repeat a picture from my last post to show the book covers:

And here are the finished bookmarks:

That was my first try at reverse stamping, with the black gryphon. I quickly realized I wasn't going to become a master of reverse stamping in a half an hour (hah!), but since I was embossing, I just filled in all the less-than-perfect parts with an embossing pen... fake mastery!

I ended up tying the bookmarks together stylistically, smudging gradient backgrounds based on each cover and then stamping and embossing a gryphon of the title's color on a circle of fancy cardstock. Each bookmark is also splattered with mist flicked from the end of the tube: gold & silver with the black gryphon, gold with the white gryphon, and silver with the silver gryphon, which also helps tie them together. (I'm so glad I came across The Artistic Stamper's Splatters and Speckles Challenge; I wouldn't have thought of doing this otherwise and I love the effect.) Usually I tie bookmark duos together using colors and/or stamps, so doing it mostly with techniques here was new and fun.

In The Silver Gryphon, the gryphon protagonist Tadrith has a twin brother. My Tad has a twin too, the result of an attempt to make the yellow-green paper fit the blue-green of the bookmark better. I liked the green I got by covering it with ink, but alas! Tad #1 was unable to completely resist the ink and became a very dull little silver gryphon. I decided I wanted shiny silver more than I wanted better-coordinated paper.

(Tadrith in the book isn't actually a silver-colored gryphon; he's a member of a scout group called the Silver Gryphons. But just like the cover artist, Jody Lee, I rather skipped that nuance. SHINY GRYPHON IS SHINY.)

I'm entering this bookmark trio in the following challenges:

• Simon Says Stamp and Show: Read All About It (trio of bookmarks inspired by a trilogy of books)
• The Artistic Stamper September Challenge: Splatters and Speckles (gold and silver splattering)
• Simon Says Stamp Challenge: Put a Stamp on It (adorable Lawn Fawn gryphon on each bookmark, but no washi tape)
• Loves Rubberstamps Challenge #16: Anything Goes (the aforementioned adorable gryphon is part of Lawn Fawn's Critters Ever After set, which is carried by Loves Rubberstamps)

I'm also linking it up to DL.ART's 1000-post Linky Party.

Supplies:

Kit: The Mage Wars

Over at the Simon Says Stamp and Show blog, this week's past challenge, Read All About It!, has been to make something inspired by books or writing.

Until someone starts hosting a "Bookmarks by Newbie Crafters" challenge, this is the best fit for my stuff there is.

I pulled together this kit to start from:

I know, I know, it looks a lot more like three kits than one. But for these bookmarks I'm drawing my inspiration from a trilogy, so I have a mini-kit for each book, with colors from the book's cover:

These three books are known as the Mage Wars trilogy, by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. The cover art for all three books is by Jody Lee, whose work is beautiful. Also, the books that Jody Lee illustrates the covers for are almost always books I enjoy. In this case, I do judge books by their covers -- if it's one of her covers, that's as good as any written recommendation.

I also pulled out a few things to try to tie the three bookmarks together visually, rather than inspired-by-series-ly. I don't know that I would normally have pulled out the Shimmer Spritz, but The Artistic Stamper's challenge this month is Splatters and Speckles. I've not tried the splatter-paint-with-mist technique and this seems like a good time -- and then the technique as well as the colors can tie the bookmarks together.

And of course Lawn Fawn's adorable griffin stamp will be a pretty obvious tie-together element as well. I tried to put it on the lens cover to help it show up, but it's pretty unrecognizable in this picture, which is why I mention it. It's just a little cuter and happier than the gryphons on the covers, but hey, griffin stamps aren't a dime a dozen. Actually, fantasy stamps that don't involve fairies or princesses seem pretty rare. Why is that?

I'm looking forward to working these up. I think I'll do the same kind of background for The White Gryphon that I did for the Rainbow Cupcakes bookmark and the unicorn Bookmarks Ever After one, putting pigment ink down and smudging it together.

Supplies:

Kit: Popsicles in the Park

Because I was working with a color challenge for the Popsicles in the Park bookmarks, I went through my little stash and grabbed those colors before thinking about what I wanted to do bookmark-wise. The assembly process itself sparked my imagination, and I ended up pulling together pretty much a whole kit: papers, inks, embossing powers, and stamps. (I don't really use embellishments on bookmarks -- a functional bookmark has to be flat.)

And then I made the bookmarks, and then I decided I should have photographed the kit too, because it was fun to put together.

Instead I photographed the remnants of the kit:

Everything I used on the bookmarks is still there -- in the case of the paper, in scraps -- plus you can see a few things I didn't use -- the pink & orange embossing powders, the little flowers/stars stamp, the striped orange paper, the shiny reddish cardstock... You can also see that I didn't really have any greens as pale as the challenge called for, but that's why the challenge rules are flexible.

Here's a closeup of the stamps and ink/powder/pen I picked out (photos are at different scales):

I had probably too much fun putting together the mini-Queue of Colorbox cat's eye inks. I found most of the colors I wanted in the Swell queue, and got the brighter pink from Tulip Field:

Of course, while the Queues are nice and compact to store, removing a few colors leaves others without a lid. So I combined the remnants of Swell and Tulip Field to create a new Queue for storage, and it actually turned out really pretty:

That would make quite a pretty colorset in and of itself, I think.

Supplies:

Bookmarks XII: Popsicles in the Park

These bookmarks were intended for the Color Throwdown Challenge #207, and were in fact done in time. I just didn't get around to taking pictures until a few days ago, which was itself several days after the challenge closed.

Well, it's really about the inspiration challenges provide, isn't it? The challenge prompted a project, so at least in that way I win.

This was the challenge swatch:

It definitely felt very summery: refreshing and fun. I picked out a bunch of supplies of the rightish colors and some cute animal stamps and made a pair of bookmarks.

I'm particularly pleased with the way the little birds fit into the paper they're stamped on, and the sort of calmness that the solidity of the bunny has. The paper all over that first bookmark turned out quite well, but really it's just there to hide the not-so-great embossing on the yellow border -- I only let the best part peek out.

Mistakes are awesome inspiration, I'm telling you.

I do wish I'd had a slightly bigger circle for the frog to peek out of on the second bookmark. The next-biggest circle I have (on the Fiskars template) was too big, and this one was just a little too small. I'll have to look into that.

I'm entering this pair of bookmarks into DL.ART's 1000-post linky party.

Supplies:

Corrected HTML for All That Scraps September Banner

Hello, All That Scrappers.  Here's the corrected code to get the September banner to link back to All That Scraps Blog and not just the banner picture:

<a style="display: inline;" href="http://atsblog.typepad.com"><img title="All That Scraps Blog" src="http://atsblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54faf4fdc8834017d3bcf9a6f970c-800wi" border="0" alt="All That Scraps Blog"></a>

(All That Scraps folks, if you'd like me to delete this post once you've grabbed the correct code, just let me know in the comments.)