Unruly Paper Arts - The Great Outdoors!

Welcome to Magpieheaven. Over at Unruly Paper Arts this month our Readers' Art Quest Challenge is to create something on the theme of The Great Outdoors! If you check out the link you will see the prompt, the colours and the Design Team's great inspiration. There's a super surprise pack of goodies to be won courtesy of Unruly Paper Arts so please link up your projects on this theme, which is actually based on unusual public holidays! We would love to see what you come up with!
Our weather in the UK has not been the best for spending time in the Great Outdoors, but after a thunderstorm yesterday and a grey start this morning, the afternoon turned out to be warm and sunny and Mr Magpie and I spent an afternoon in our 'Great Outdoors', which is a local park with a stretch of river where we've seen kingfishers and woods full of wonderful, old trees, I have created a simple card, which evokes an afternoon in the great outdoors to me! These days I try find ways to create texture on cards without making them too bulky for postage.

This background I created by brayering with PaperArtsy Fresco paints in Tangerine Twist, Hey Pesto and Smurf. I then used a Stencil Girl stencil of a wood with birds, a Lin Brown leaf stencil by Electica at PaperArtsy and a Clearsnaps mask of a birch wood with some Dreamweavers' stencil brushes with a small quantity of Chalk Fresco. For the little birds, I stencilled in Inky pool and then shifted the stencil just slightly over to one side and stencilled again in Smurf so as to give the birds and the trees dimension.

 I stamped a leaf from Darcy's Eclectica collection in Guacamole and some Lin Brown swirls in Antarctic and I now had a master-board, which I could cut up into sections. I was pleased with the way that the stencils and paint colours and the brayering conveyed the texture of bark. 

I arranged these on a Kraft card blank, decorating the spaces between with some Sage and Hey Pesto Fresco used with sequin waste as a stencil.

The sentiment 'Live in the Sunshine' by Artistic Outpost is stamped onto painted card in Wendy Vecchi Geranium Archival ink and clear embossed.

A quick and simple card, which should fit easily into an envelope for mailing. I do hope that you have been able to spend some time in the Great Outdoors yourself this weekend and that you will find some time to create a celebration of this lovely theme and link it up Here. Meanwhile I will leave the last word on The Great Outdoors to Wordsworth!

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

                    William Wordsworth.