Scene Building - An English Country Garden

It's the first of December! That means the start of a new challenge on the Claritystamp Challenge Blog. The theme for this month is classic Clarity - "Scene Building".

Congratulations to the winner and top 5 of this month's "Christmas" Challenge. Quite a few of those featured beautiful scenes. I think it's something that most Clarity fans enjoy and I look forward to seeing what you all create.

This is what I've made. It uses the Cottage Scene Stencil that Barbara used on the lesson show yesterday.

I think that the secret to a good scene lies in the planning and I probably spend as long doing this as I do making it.

The first thing I do is flick though my Claritystamp Catalogue, which contains stamped images of all of the Clarity stamps that I own, and choose which ones I am going to use. The main one I picked here was the Small Swing stamp. I then chose stamps that I thought were the correct scale and would complement it.

I then start stamping them to work out where they're all going to go. This is some of my rough work from this scene (ignore the strange church on its side on the top middle one, I think I was just looking at the difference between first and second generation ink). It also shows the paper I ripped to create the hills.

I initially used the black part of the cottage but then I realised that I didn't I didn't need that for planning, I could just put the stencil on top of the paper (you can see that in the bottom middle image). As you can see I don't worry too much about technique when I'm doing this, it's just about trying to get the composition (especially the perspective) right. Just moving a stamp slightly can make a big difference. 

I made the scene, especially the sky, a lot more vibrant than I normally would as the black is quite stark. The silhouettes are all stamped in black Archival except for the weather vane which is embossed. 

On the previous versions of this, that I blogged last month, I used black acrylic paint and the Gelli plate for the black area. On yesterday's show Barbara used Black Soot Distress Ink and a make-up sponge. For this version though I cut it out of black card with my Silhouette Cameo.

Just for fun I converted the photo into black & white. I quite like that version too.

This is such a versatile stencil as you can theme the scene to suit the recipient. Jackie asked on Facebook yesterday about a golfing scene and I think it would work really well. Where we lived before here was next to a really hilly course and this scene reminds me of it. You could put the horizon a bit lower and add in some more detail in the sky - a sun, some birds, text or even a hot air balloon. The rolling hills could then be transformed into a golf course - you could add a bunker, draw in some flags and the golfer silhouette from the Remountable Sport Set. I hope that helps Jackie. 

Stamps and Stencils Used

Small Swing

Cows and Small Cockerel from the remountable Farm Set

Weather Vane - Lesson 21

Well and Lamp Post from the Remountable Village Set

Labrador from the Remountable Home Set

Church

Forest Ridge

Cottage Scene

Lynne

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