Masking is a great way to add perspective to your stamped images and it’s super easy to do. In just a few steps you are able to layer stamped images so that you see all the lines of the images in the front and some of lines on the images at the back are partially hidden. By doing this your stamped designs will look much more realistic.

The example I am going to show you today is very basic but I wanted to show you just how easy this technique really is.

I used a cute little stamp that is an outline of a flower and Memento Dye inks for stamping and colouring the flowers. That’s one great thing about these inks that is different from other dye inks – once they are dry they won’t run and bleed if you get them wet. So, I stamped the flowers with the Tuxedo Black and then water coloured them later and the outline stayed crisp.

The first step is to stamp the images that you want to be in the foreground (at the very front) onto cardstock. In this case I stamped three of the flowers along the bottom edge.

Next you need to stamp two more flower images onto scrap paper (not cardstock) and cut them out. These are going to be your ‘masks’ and you need to cut out as many as you would need to cover all the images that you have just stamped on the cardstock.

When they are all cut out turn them over and give them a light coat of  Wacky Tack glue and let them dry. That will make them sticky just like a Post-It note and you can use them over and over. This is a great glue for any application where you want something to be repositionable.

Now you need to place them over the images that you already stamped on your cardstock to cover them completely. Make sure they are lined up correctly and none of the original images are showing through.

Ink up your stamp once again and stamp right over the masks so that part of the image is over them.

See how the images all overlap. That is what it would look like if you hadn’t done any masking and just stamped one on top of the other.

Here’s the magic part of all this. When you take off the masks, the other flowers look like they are sitting behind the first ones you stamped. So cool!

Imagine all the possibilities! Combine different flowers into beautiful bouquets. Put bigger elements behind smaller ones.  Make a realistic looking forest of trees. There’s just no end to what you can do with masking!

To finish off the card I watercoloured the flowers using the Memento inks. It’s a quick and easy way to colour any image. To use your ink pads for this just rub them on to a plastic pallette of some kind and then add water from a brush until you get the shade that you want and then water colour as usual.

To finish off I cut around the flowers at the top, added some yellow glitter to the flower centers and mounted it on my card base with foam dots. Then I used my Tombow Mono Aqua and put dots of clear glue all over the top of the card and added crystal glitter on top. A little yellow bow and you have a quick and easy card.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s tutorial and that you will give this technique a try.

Thanks for dropping by.

Kate