A CAS approach to a sketch

It's the CAS team's turn to take on this month's sketch at House of Cards today and I thought I'd try and show you that you can take what looks like a full-on layered sketch and turn it into a one layer CAS card but still with lots of interest.

It's very easy really - you just need to work back to front, starting with the foremost "layer" and then masking everything off and stamping to put the next layers "behind" the focal image.  So I began by stamping the Camellia from Waltzingmouse and embossing it in white and heat setting.  I stamped it again in black onto post-it tape (fully sticky all over) and fussy it cut it out to create a mask which I stuck onto the stamped flower.  Next I stamped a leaf from the set over the mask and onto the base card on either side to represent the dots on the sketch - again embossing (after taking the mask off).   I stamped two leaves onto post-it tape again and masked off the flower and leaves this time.

To create my circle, I used a new stamp from IndigoBlu which just drew me to it at a recent show as I thought it would be useful for this sort of card.  It's called "square peg round hole" and I simply stamped it in wet cement ink from Hero Arts.  Again I stamped it to make a mask (this time onto copy paper as the post it tape isn't wide enough) and roughly cut around it to make the circle shape on the sketch.  To create my "band" I stamped a triple stripe from the Basic Stripes set from Clearly Besotted in black ink.

Once all the stamping was done, I went back to adding interest to my focal flower - I used a quick water colouring technique (hence the embossing in the first place) - I just used two pink shimmer paints and two green, painting the lightest on the outside and darker in the middle and quickly blending.  I used the smallest amount of water I could get away with to ensure the card didn't buckle as I wasn't using water colour card stock.

I finished with a decent sized sentiment (Hero Arts) to give the large card some balance but still giving an overall CAS feel.

So now it's your turn - hopefully I've inspired you to give CAS a go!