Hi all, it’s Tuesday! For today’s tip, I have an easy technique to share with you that can make for gorgeous cards. The technique is called masking – covering up part of your card while stamping, then removing the ‘mask’ to reveal amazing beauty! Keep reading to the bottom for my 3 best tips for masking. Here is the card I’ll be making for demonstration.
I’ll be using the Christmas Magic stamp set. This set comes with really neat stamps, including the train, North Pole post, trees, an old-timey snowman, large jingle bell, and a few greetings.
I wanted to stamp a scene using a few of the stamps. Below, you can see what I created.
It just doesn’t look right, does it? The problem in the image above is when images overlap, you lose the sense of realism. There’s no depth, because all of the images show through each other instead of some being in front of others. Masking is an easy way to solve the problem. In this case, I’m making a mask to cover the train. As you can see in the photo, I stamped one train on the card front, and a second one on separate cardstock, which I then cut out.
Here, I have covered up the stamped train with the mask. Next, while holding it in place, I’ll stamp the other images around it.
After stamping the North Pole sign and trees, I removed the mask and voila!
Here are the unmasked and masked scenes shown side by side. The one on the right clearly looks more realistic.
Now that you’ve waited long enough, here are my 3 best tips for masking.
- Create your mask on sticky notes, or place repositionable adhesive on the back of the mask. This will allow you to stick it temporarily to the paper so it doesn’t move while you stamp over them.
- Keep your mask in the appropriate stamp case, so that next time you want it it’s right there with the matching stamp.
- Don’t get too worked up about cutting absolutely perfectly around your mask. In my opinion, it’s better to cut slightly inside the edge of your stamped image than outside. If you cut outside the lines, you would end up with white space around the edges after you do your masked stamping.
Here’s the card I created using our beautiful This Christmas designer paper.
Isn’t this vintage train stamp fantastic?
I stamped the train and North Pole sign on the inside of the card as well, along with the greeting.
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Order the products I used and make this card yourself!
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