Basically Blue

I don't normally do photoless layouts, but I did this one for my friend Darcy and wanted her to use it as she wishes. I gave them to her at her bachelorette party last Friday night, so they are no longer "top secret."
Also, since she is one of my cyber sisters, I figured it would be appropriate to share them with you here! Hi Darcy, hope you are having a FABULOUS time on your honeymoon!!!

I used one of my sketches (see below) as the initial inspiration, but I decided to change it up a little. The truth is, after I created that section on the bottom left, I didn't have the heart to cover it up! What? you say, that's not patterned paper? No it is not, I stamped that part using my own crazy version of emboss resist. I guess we could call it "Silly Sally's Sloppy Emboss Resist!"

I used VersaMark clear pigment ink and stamped an image from Brocade Basics. Then, taking my sweet time about it, I sprinkled clear embossing powder over the image. I was NOT careful to cover the stamped images completely before I heated it with my heat tool. Then I brayered over the top with Classic ink and the brayer picked up and ghosted some areas that weren't fully embossed. I was really pleased with the distressed/aged look I achieved, and will certainly be experimenting with this again!

The right side of my layout has some freestyle paper piercing. I lightly drew a swirling design with a pencil and "traced" back over it with the piercing tool before erasing any residual pencil marks, and went back over it with my white get pen. I love the texture this creates! No page would be complete without some smudges of craft ink, so of course I did that too!

I really like the effects of blocks on a page. Blocks of color, blocked photos, blocked papers with photos overlapping...
I'm hoping to get some more mileage out of this sketch. I would also LOVE to see what you can do with it!