Birthday Balloon - Sunny Studio Stamps

Hi everyone, Milene here!! :)

I am so excited to be joining this talented team for the month of June. Thanks to Jennifer and Kerys for having me!

For my first project as a guest designer, I chose to use the "Birthday Balloon" stamp set by Sunny Studio Stamps. This set contains three layers of stamps to create a very realistic looking balloon.

I started out by picking out my ink colors. I chose three shades of yellow, red and teal. You want to start out with your lightest ink and most solid stamp, and move on to the darker shades. To accomplish a one layer look, I did masking on some of my balloons. I used post-it notes for that.

The ink colors I used were:

Yellow: Lawn Fawn Butter, Lawn Fawn Sunflower and Hero Arts Butter Bar;

Red: Lawn Fawn Peachy Keen, Hero Arts Fiesta Red and Lawn Fawn Lobster;

Teal: Lawn Fawn Minty Fresh, Lawn Fawn Mermaid and Lawn Fawn Peacock;

I also used Lawn Fawn Manatee for the strings and bows, Versafine for the sentiment and Versamark for prepping my stamps.

Here are some tips for stamping the balloons:

• - Season your stamps prior to creating your project. You may want to stamp it several times or use Versamark ink as an undercoat;
• - Use a stamping tool! I can't even tell you how important it is to be able to double stamp;
• - Allow your ink to dry between layers for more definition;
• - Use your colored pencils or alcohol markers to fill in gaps, if your masking isn't perfect;
• - Double stamp the same color of ink to get a darker shade of the same color. That way you don't need several inks;
• - Add a shimmer pen over your stamping to "smooth things out". You can also add details with a white gel pen to cover up mistakes.

If you don't get your masking done perfectly, don't stress! You can always use colored pencils or alcohol markers to fix the blank spots. If you look closely at my stamping, you'll see that it's not perfect around the edges. I have a very small set of colored pencils and did my best to match the colors :)

After my balloon layers were stamped, I moved on to adding the bows and strings. I did a little masking here as well, to make sure that things wouldn't overlap awkwardly.

I created a circle window on a piece of white cardstock and stamped my greeting, from the same stamp set. For a final embelishment, I added little star confettis around the balloons.

If you haven't yet, I hope you give this fun stamp set a try! I'll see you all next time!