Why I Use Brilliance Ink

Hi all!  Every time you see an image stamped in black on my blog, 99.999% of the time, it will have been stamped in Tsukineko’s Graphite Black Brilliance pigment ink.  When the Tsukineko Tuxedo Black Memento dye ink came out, I saw a lot of Copic users raving about it so I decided to try it out myself. 

Here’s an image (by Dandelion Designs) that I’ve stamped with Memento on the left and Brilliance on the right:

As you can see, they both stamp very nicely, with very good coverage.  But when you look at it really closely, this is what you see:

The Memento side looks a bit fuzzy, but the Brilliance side is really crisp and clear (you can click on the images to see them even larger). For most people, that little difference doesn’t matter, but for me, I prefer the cleaner images you get with the Brilliance ink.  Yes, the Brilliance does take longer to dry than the Memento, but I think it’s worth the wait.  So that’s why I use Brilliance instead of Memento for stamping in black.  Hope this helps and TFL!

Pile It On Watercoloring

I have a project today instead of a card:


I've had this adorable little unused stamp from Dandelion Designs called Monkey for a while now, so I decided to use him for this little tag. This week's challenge at Pile It On is watercoloring so I stamped him on a scrap of watercolor paper and colored him with a waterbrush and Peerless watercolors. I added just a bit of Stickles to the flower centers, cut him out and stuck him into a Making Memories tag rim.

Here's a close shot:


Unfortunately the watercoloring doesn't show up very well on such a small image, so you'll just have to trust that I really did watercolor it!

Challenges:

• Pile It On - watercoloring and combine with at least one other challenge
• Project Tuesday - sour cream container
• Pink Elephant - animals
• Belli Challenge - metal tags
• Charisma Cardz - tag it

I hope you like it and TFL!

Monkey Surprise!

I recently bought a few Dandelion Designs stamps from a local scrapbook store and finally used one. I decided to play in the Taylored Expressions Cupcake Challenge #66 and thought this cute image of a monkey holding a present was perfect for it:


Buuuut... I really like using cupcakes when I'm playing in Taylor's challenges, so I decided to change up the image a bit and put a cupcake in his hands to cover up the present:


The cupcake is from the Susie Surprise set from The Greeting Farm and the sentiment was done with some super old Making Memories rub-ons. Hope you like it and TFL!

Other materials used: patterned paper - Basic Grey (Eva paper pad); white ribbon - May Arts; green ribbon from stash; flowers - Prima; buttons - Papertrey Ink; scallop border punch - Stampin' Up!; brads - Pink Hedgehog Papercrafts; Copic markers; small fern punch - CarlaCraft; Mega Curved Rectangles Nestabilities.