A Blog Named Hero

The official Hero Arts challenge blog!

A Non Traditional Christmas Card

I’m back with another card for our November Holiday Event celebrating our 2016 collaboration partners and paying it forward to you, our readers!

For my project today I went with non-traditional colors, my Christmas Tree is white with bright pinks and blues for ornaments. I made a water color background with Zig Clean Color markers and did a ton of gold embossing

All of us on the design team will be offering up 1 stamp set for a total of 10 awesome prizes for 10 winners!! All you have to do is comment on any post this month and/or for extra entries, link up a holiday project of your own to our main challenge page HERE

Good Luck!!

Texture Challenge Winner

We have had the best time this month with our collaboration with Ellen Hutson. Every time they have a new release, I really want to just click on “buy it all”. I know that if I did, I would not be disappointed. Such creative stamp and die sets, unique, great sentiments, lovely styles. And on that note, let’s get right to the winner, since I’m a wee bit jealous. 🙂

Step right up, entry #2… that’s Karin with this amazing embroidered card. Great upcycling of a stained tablecloth. Make sure to email us at ABlogNamedHero at gmail dot com and we will get your prize set up for you.

Here are a few other entries that caught our eye this month.
Love all of the color and texture on this tag. Helen, this is just gorgeous. 
There is something about Conil’s card that makes me smile. Maybe because the pocket can hold secrets? 
Lovely colors on this card from Svitlana. If you like this stamp set, you should make sure to enter next month’s challenge. 

Please make sure to stop by tomorrow for the announcement of our October challenge. It should be a fun one.

And one last time to say how much we appreciate Ellen Hutson. The woman and the store. They are both amazing.

Hello No Line Watercoloring

Have you tried no line watercoloring? Wow. It’s not for sissies. It’s strange, because it’s somewhat relaxing, and yet also stressful. At least for me. Yet, I absolutely love the result.

I stamped this using Spun Sugar distress ink, for the flowers, onto watercolor paper. Now, I suggest you stamp the ink off once onto scratch paper, and then onto your watercolor paper. I also suggest that you listen to that tip, and do the same when you stamp your leaves. Ahem. I did not do that. I went with it anyway. 🙂
I used a few shades of distress ink to paint the petals, always working on petals that were not touching each other, so they would dry without merging with another petal. Even though I felt like this was a hot mess when I was working on it last night, when I woke up this morning and went over to the desk, I might have gasped. In a good way. 
Now, since I loved this panel so much, I didn’t want to stamp a sentiment on it. I pondered many different sentiments, and found a few that would have fit into the white space, but… I was afraid to put ink on this panel, even with the MISTI. So, I decided to take advantage of our challenge theme this month, Texture, and die cut the word directly from the panel. This also induced fear, but it worked out just fine. I used the same paper as the card base to make three additional die cuts to add some depth to this sentiment.
I had die cut the panel using a Lawn Fawn stitched rectangle for a little bit of a finish and then used a few sequins to add some bling. Now I can’t wait to send this to someone. Someone special, obviously. 
You’ve got one day left to join us for our challenge. Up for grabs is something from Ellen Hutson! How fun is that?

Sunshine

If you look at the new Silver LInings dies by Julie Ebersole for Ellen Hutson you’ll see it has clouds, lightning, raindrops and then the two dies with sun rays.  And the sweet sentiment set, Warm Fuzzies, has a wonderful variety that can be used with all sorts of stamps.  So I designed a card using both sets.

I began my card by using my Brushos in orange and yellow with water to make a background.  Then I die cut the piece with both the sunshine dies and carefully kept all the pieces together.  I adhered both pieces onto another piece of cs and then added foam tape to put it on the orange background piece.  I stamped and embossed the sentiment on a scrap of black cs, arranged the gold metallic thread and attached to the background piece.  Layered another piece of yellow and then all onto a white card base.  Added a few gold sequins and done!  The dimensions of the finished card are 4 1/4 x 4 1/2.

Our challenge theme this month is:

and our generous sponsor is:

Lots of texture today in my card with the die cuts, embossing, card layers and embellishments.  There’s still time to enter our challenge this month – you could win a great prize from Ellen Hutson!!

A Blog Named Hero recently announced a Design Team call for 2017 – details are here – consider sending in your application – it’s a great experience!!

Thanks for visiting today and love to read your kind comments.

  

Ellen Hutson Oh Ship!

Hi friends! Welcome back to another collaboration post with our sponsor this month, Ellen Hutson!

http://www.ellenhutson.com

I used this adorable set designed by Julie Ebersole, Stay Salty – so cute with great images and adorable sentiments!

I went completely CAS with a cute little boat, some sparkly waves and puffy clouds – easy peasy!

I stamped the image in Hero Arts intense black and colored with copics. I cut the frame with MFT’s wonky circle dies, adhered to a yellow card base and finished with a few enamel dots. Thanks for stopping by; hope you’ll join our TEXTURE challenge this month; we enjoy seeing your creations!

Hugs,