A Blog Named Hero

45 years have fluttered by

It has been so much fun this month celebrating with Hero Arts and their 45 years of bringing us amazing stamping products.

I purchased my first Hero Arts stamp over 30 years ago and I still have all the catalogues I purchased from them as well. Browsing through them brings back wonderful memories of projects I created with their stamps.

For today’s share I’m actually using a couple of NEW stamp sets I recently purchased.

I wanted to create a simple card but add interest by layering ink on the background.
I started by die cutting a stitched rectangle from watercolor paper and then used the Teal Hero Arts Liquid Watercolor to add a light wash over the left side.

Next, I used the Rain Dance Hero Stencil and the Green Apple Ink with my Life Changing Brush to add a little contrasting detail to my background. (you know me and green and blue – love it together).

The final step for the background was to use my Misty Stamp Positioner to stamp 3 of the butterfly stamps from New Day Butterflies Combo set in black in and to try and resist the urge to color them haha.

I layered this to a piece of Kiwi card stock before attaching it to my Hero Arts Adriatic card base.
I stamped another single butterfly onto a piece of Neenah Solar White 80# card stock with the Hero Arts Intense Black ink and used my copics to color it before cutting it out with the coordinating dies.

The final piece for the card was white heat embossing the sentiment onto a scrap of black. the sentiment is from a New to me set “hand drawn Everyday Messages” and I love the font in this set.

Congratulations to you Hero Arts on your 45 years, and for being such a positive leader to this stamping community of ours. Here’s to many more successful years ahead.

Visit my personal blog here for a free PDF download of today’s Celebrate card.

May Challenge!

Hello again crafty friends,

First of all we’d like to wish our beloved Hero Arts a VERY happy 45th anniversary!!! We’re so proud of the beautiful images you make and what a positive force you are in the crafting industry.

It’s time to get your crafty thinking caps on today because for this month’s challenge we want you to CELEBRATE! Any kind of cards that are geared towards happiness, celebration and congratulations! Have fun with it!

Our Design Team have been getting crafty to provide you with inspiration!

What do you think?! Lots of different styles huh!?

 

We do hope you’ll join us for this challenge, its’ so fun to go back through some favourite stamps!

 

Please join via the linky tool below, and we can’t wait to see what you create! You have until 5pm on the 10th of next month (June) to enter!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

 

A Clean and Simple Birthday!

A huge slice of birthday cake for Hero Arts 45th Anniversary!  Hero Arts started making stamps in the 1970s and is still going strong today.

Did you know that all of Hero Arts stamps are made at their factory in California and that the company has put many green practices in place?  All of that, as well as great stamps!

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For my post today I wanted to wish them a Happy Birthday/Anniversary with this modification of the layering cake stamp set inspired by some of those amazing rainbow cakes we all see on Instagram. I used the Color Layering Birthday set and the Snarky Mix and Match Messages for the Sentiment.  I really like the bold, and simple font and it has some funny second lines that go with it. To start the design, I stamped it out on scrap paper to see if I would be able to realistically layer all the rainbow colors.

Then I took an 8.5×11 piece of Dove white and  Pebble Hero Arts Cardstock and cut off 4 inches so that when I folded it in half, it would be 3.5 inches wide by 8.5 tall, your scrap can be a card layer for another card.

I inked up the cake portion of the stamp two colors at a time with my mini-ink cubes from MMH kits, so red on the bottom part and orange on the top, then the next two colors and the next, stamping two by two all the way to the top. You can use any inks you have in ROYBGIV ( red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) order. I wanted 8 layers so have two purples.

I then used Versamark to add the white embossing powder to the frosting area, and heat set it till it was smooth. For the frosting between the lower layers I used my Versamark pen to draw in the rest of the frosting lines between the colors and on the side of the cake. Then fussy cut it out after stamping the candle on top.

Pink-envelope-card

I wanted a clean look with the cake really emphasizing the tall format of the card so used the Happy Birthday, and gold embossed that and the sparkles behind the candle directly on the card base. I gold heat embossed the candle too but afterward made it three dimensional with some liquid pearls in gold and orange. I added the cake with some foam behind it and added a soft Copic shadow underneath it.

I love that you can make all your favorite flavors of cake and frosting and don’t have to stop at just two layers with this set. If you have any questions just ask. Enjoy!

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It’s April Challenge Time!

Hi there!

It’s crafting time!  This months challenge is

ChallengeCleanSimple

and we can’t wait for you to see the inspiration the DT has come up with!

 

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Sandi

SO gorgeous, right?! I can’t wait to get inky all over again!

We hope you’ll join us this month for your chance to win a $50 or $25 voucher from our delightful sponsors Hero Arts!

Please enter via the linky tool below:

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

 

Hero Arts Marble Bold Prints

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Hi all! I’m Gwendolyn and I’m so happy to be on the Hero Arts challenge design team. Before I present my card, I would like to present myself. I’m originally from Singapore but I’ve lived more than half my life away from home, working in places like New Zealand, France and now Germany (I’m wearing the traditional Bavarian costume in the photo above). I started crafting 5 years ago, with a scrapbook project that took me 2 years (!) and put me off all paper crafts until a friend introduced me to cardmaking and since then I’ve been hooked! This also led me to discover watercolouring, which is now one of my favourite mediums to colour with. You can discover more on my blog, or on Instagram or Facebook. I also have a Youtube channel where I try to share my process videos…that is when my slow internet allows me…

embossing

So now to my card, which I made to inspire you to join our current challenge which is all about Embossing. When I first started cardmaking, people used to say that my signature was all the embossing I did! It’s now replaced by water-colouring I guess, but I still have a huge stock of embossing powders so it was such a pleasure to use them for my first post here and I went a little crazy with the embossing as you can see!

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I used Hero Arts Marble Bold Print background stamp which I got 2 years ago but never use… and stamped it all over with Versamark clear embossing ink. I then took my clear card base and pressed it firmly over the stamp. I proceeded to cover the clear sticky ink with the embossing powers starting with the top colour, being careful to pour it only on the parts of the stamp I wanted that colour to be, tapping away the excess before pouring on another colour. Only once the whole card was covered with the 3 colours, did I melted the powders with a heat gun.

Marble bold embossing products

 

 

 

When it dried, I covered the background with Hero Arts Fresh Peach Mid tone shadow ink, which is the same ink I coloured the “Happy” sentiment from Hero Arts Happy Stamp and Cut stamp & die set, before I heat embossed it with Hero Arts clear embossing powder. To finish, I stamped the other sentiments on black card stock with clear embossing ink, covered it with Hero Arts gold embossing powder and heat set it.

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Isn’t the shimmer wonderful?  I hope my card has inspired you to make a card with some embossing on it, you don’t have to use as much embossing as I did, although if you want an extra challenge, I dare you to do more embossing then I did on this card! 😉 I look forward to seeing your cards in the challenge gallery here.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great week! Hugs,

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