Riikka Kovasin - Paperiliitin: Peace is Everything

Hi there! It's the third and final post of November Trio! But what are Trios? Trios are posts that I started while I was a member of the Seth Apter Creative Team. I enjoyed making a series of three posts so much, that I decided to continue them at least for a while. If you want to see the older Seth Trios, you can find them under this label (link). The Trio posts usually had a topic, or a product, to which I concentrated, like Izink ICE (link). Or I could challenge myself with limited supplies (link) or use one source of inspiration for three pieces, like I did with "Mothers of Kalevala" (link). In a way they are extended versions of the "Inspired By" posts we used to make together with Marsha Valk. You can explore those posts under this label (link).

This month the Trio is done in co-operation with Heidin Korttipaja (link) - a Finnish online store. Korttipaja has own stamp and die sets with phrases in Finnish for different situations. I received the stamp and die sets used in these projects and decided to make a Trio to show them off. During the three days I make two cards and an art journal page using the stamps different ways. As Korttipaja is a Finnish company, the videos are spoken in Finnish this time. But the subtitles are written in English so you can still follow the process.

You have seen the two cards already. The first one with the summer vibe and sentiment showing through a hole cut to the front and the winter one with sentiment layered on top of the embellishment cluster. Today I'm showing an art journal page with several stamp sets in use. Whereas in the two cards there's been mainly bigger words in use, this time I relied heavily on the smaller stamps.

I love the Tim Holtz word stickers in white and black. These two colors go to most of my projects as they are and add a fun little detail. So, for this art journal page, I decided to make my own little Finnish word "tiles" inspired by the Tim Holtz ones. I cut both white and black strips of cardstock and then stamped the words onto those. The words put one after the other don't make any reasonable scentence, but maybe they could inspire a story? The first couple of lines translate freely "From us to you and beautiful, rewarding, autumn, wonderful, you, head(or main), journey".

I played with the text elements in this page, also other than the little tiles. As you could see from the video, I started the whole page by adding a torn piece from an old book to the page and stamped one word over and over again to the rest of the page. While you can't see that word almost at all in the finished page, it's still an easy way to break the blank page and get going. I then used the same word as a part of the title of the page in the end. The word said "Peaceful" but I cut it shorter to state just "Peace". Now the title says: "Wonderful peace is everything for you".

Although I'm concentrating on the word stamps in this Trio in a way, I'm also showing different ways to color the floral stamp. In the first one I colored each bloom with markers, yesterday's version was all at once and then a touch of highlights and today I'm adding different color areas, but again more in a haphazard way than painstakingly coloring each segment. For that I'm using a stamping tool. I'm first stamping a sketch to a piece of cardstock and then smudge the paint towards the right places. Like green for the leaves, orange for the flowers. After drying the paints I then put the piece back to the stamping tool and stamp the outlines on top. This is a way I've used when coloring stamped images with embossing powder, too.

Thank you for stopping by today! I hope you've liked this series and found the Finnish voice overs fun. Wishing you a wonderful weekend! And please remember the Facebook live tomorrow!