Krafty Tips and Tutes #37- Adding Glitter to Your Winter Cards

Welcome to another week of Krafty Tips and Tutes here at Kraftin' Kimmie Stamps!  Each week one of our fabulous Krafty Girls share a little post with some sort of tip or tutorial for you and we hope you find them inspirational! 

Hello, friends! It's Jenny here, and today I have a photo tutorial to share with you, showing how I like to add some dimension to my wintery stamps using loose glitter! There are many different products and techniques that stampers use to add snow or that white fuzzy trim on their stamped images, and I am going to show you my favourite (at the moment…let's face it, our favourites change from month to month!).

Here is a lineup of the products that I like to use:

For any snow or white trim that I do, I use Tim Holtz Distress Stickles Dry Glitter in Clear Rock Candy on top of Glossy Accents. This is a HUGE jar. It cost $20 at my LSS when I had one and trust me, I almost fainted at the price and didn't buy it. But then I thought about how much was in there and the fact that I'll likely never have to shop for glitter again in my lifetime, and so I took the plunge. This was one year ago and I use this stuff ALL THE TIME. It literally just stays on my desk and never gets put away. And, there is about 1 cm gone off the top. I am starting to think that the Costco giant saran wrap roll has met it's match in this jar of glitter. 

 I grabbed an old paper pad from awhile back, but I knew I wanted to go with these colours. The stamp I chose to use is one from the larger set called Lexi's Winter Fun. I coloured my image up prior to this tutorial, minus the white areas, which I will get to in a bit!

First I am going to work on the snow mounds on the ground, at the base of her feet. I think it's really important to 'ground' my images, whether with shadows, grass, snow, or whatever. Just so they don't have the appearance of floating on your card front.  For my snow, I use the copics shown above: 0, C1, C3, BG10 and BG11.

Just go ahead and draw some little mounds of snow with your darkest grey, C3.

Now we are going to go in just under that C3 with C1 and push along our C3 line, and draw it a bit further down towards the bottom. 

You can completely skip this next colour if you like, I sometimes do! But depending on your colour palette, a little bit of blue-green can be a nice touch! I just went in with my BG11 first, and then drug the colour down a bit with the lighter BG10.

And finish off with your colourless blender, 0, and blend it out, softening the drift lines and muting the colours. Do the same technique with the larger falling snow on the image, keeping the darks at the bottoms and working your way to the lights on the top.

Now I am going to start the fuzzy trim on her clothes! I usually use a stipple, or dotting technique when I am colouring fur. Sometimes I use brushstrokes if it looks like a longer haired type trim, but if the edges are clean, I picture the fur to be a tight knit, short kind of look :)

I used here 0, C0, C1, C3, and C5. I always start with my darkest when using Copics, and the same goes when I am doing the fur. Starting with C3, gently dot in your shadow areas. Be aware to have a soft hand and use very little pressure, barely touching the brush tip to the paper. You want TINY dots here! And don't get carried away. Remember that we still have 4 more markers to get through.

Now you can go over your C3 with C5, and take the grey a wee bit further into the white space.

Now again, with the C1. Over the C5 and 3, and further into the white area. Now you can take your colourless blender, 0, and go over it all, still dabbing with your tip. This does not have to be perfect!! We are going to be covering it all with glitter, so any imperfections won't be noticeable, but you will still see shading through that glitter! That's the whole point of this part of journey ;)

Okay, now we are ready to add the glitter!! *Note that under normal circumstances I would assemble my entire card and add the glitter as the very last step, but for the sake of doing a photo tutorial, I've changed up my order ;) You might also notice that I did add some pastel shading to the image before applying the glitter.

I use Glossy Accents and rather than giving the areas a full, thick coat, I also dabb with the tip of bottle. So there are some spots in the white that do not have glossy accents applied. I think in the end, this gives the fur more dimension yet, and keeps it more realistic looking. So on the fur, just dabb dabb dabb! I do this in stages, as you don't want the Glossy Accents to dry at all. You want to get that glitter on when it's good and wet. I worked from the top of the image to the bottom, applying the Glossy Accents and glitter, in thirds. When applying the Glossy Accents to the snowdrifts, I just swipe the nozzle along the snowdrifts and pour the glitter over, tapping off the access.

And here is the finished card! I added in some snowflake die cuts, also coating them with Glossy Accents and glitter, and topped them with a button and twine embellishment. I also added a tiny black rhinestone to the centre of the flower on her toque.

Adding glitter to your images can take a drab card to the next level and really add a lot! I hope you've learned something in my tutorial about how to tackle that white trim on your winter images and ground your snowy scenes!

Thanks for stopping by! 

Jenny