A fun afternoon project!

If you've been searching for just the right gift for your mom or grandma this Mother's Day, I (Julie) thought I'd share an easy project that makes an artist out of anyone!

All you need is a unfinished wood frame (I bought mine for $1 at Michael's), your favorite stamp set (I picked up my Sweet Pea set ), StazOn ink, some acrylic paint, a fine and a fine line black permanent paint.

I started by giving my frame a white wash - which is just painting it with watered down white paint. After it dried, I stamped my Sweet Peas in each corner. With StazOn, you want to make sure that you clean your stamp right away! This is a solvent based ink. It's ok in short spurts, but leave the ink on your polymer stamp and over time, it could damage the polymer!

Here's a look so far!
And, here's a close up....
These are the colors of paint that I picked - two shades of green, two shades of pink and some white....(they are all "well loved" bottles of paint!)

Then, I started to paint with a fine tip paint brush, making sure to darken the areas I wanted shadows and lightening highlighted areas with dabs of white.

While the look above is "OK," I knew I wanted to see the definition in my flowers. So, I grabbed a permanent file line black pen and started to outline the stamped image - like this....

Now I was in a quandary because I thought it didn't look soft enough! So, I let the permanent black pen ink dry and then I took my white wash paint (watered down paint) and I took a foam sponge and sponged the white wash over my entire frame. When this was done, I took a large dry brush and dipped it a bit into ivory paint and added some antique streaks. Its a great way to get a hand painted look without being an artist!! :-)

When it was done it looked like this....

I just love that picture of my daughter and her Nana! So did my daughter! It now sits on the shelf in her room.

Hope you enjoyed this little project. Like I said - all you need is a fun stamp, some paint, a picture frame.... and an afternoon!