Breathe by Tracey Campbell

 Hello Bee Arty Peeps, it is Tracey Campbell here today with another Creative Team creation to share. I decided to give the Bee Arty Creative Hive (Facebook Groups) Monthly Challenge a go. The cool fresh colours and beautiful sketch made me wish for crisp spring mornings in this dreary wet weather we are having. I am in New South Wales and we have had two weeks of rain, with for to come, there is flooding and mud slides happening around us. So retreating into my creative zone with this months challenge was a great way to escape. 

Here is the sketch and colour combo for the March Challenge, no you don't have to use both, but I have. You can find the challenge here: Bee Arty Creative Hive

To start with I drew an outline of butterfly onto some sheet music.

Next I fussy cut the hand drawn butterfly and two butterflies from the Turning cut-a-part sheet in the Embrace Change collection

With a paint brush paint Tangareen Dream Colour Shimmer Spray in the centre of Steel Plate pattern paper from the Graffiti Grunge Collection. Graffiti Grunge is an older collection that is full of fun surprising papers that are great a starting place for messy backgrounds and perfect to represent the grey from the colour challenge for this creation.

Next I spread some Apple of My Eye Colour Paste through the Party Lights stencil. I repositioned the stencil so that the leaves ran off in three different directions, pointing towards the top left and top right corners and then bottom left hand corner. See the photo below to see the positioning. Once it was dry I repeated the stencilling process with Lemon Zing Colour Paste. Sorry I didn't take a photo with the Lemon Zing stencilling at this stage, but you can slightly see the two over lapping colours in the final layout, it is very subtle.

When the Colour Paste was dry I used the straw from the bottle of Stormy Weather Colour Shimmer Spray to splatter drops of the stray across the page.

To add the line boarder that is on the sketch I used a fine paint brush and some Stormy Weather Colour Shimmer Cube to paint the outline around the very edge of the base. Note: the Colour Shimmer Cubes are no longer available in the store as but you can substitute this part by using a thin paint brush and the Colour Shimmer Spray. If you choose to do this, don't shake up the bottle of the Shimmer Spray dip the brush in to get the thick sediment that settles on the bottom. It will give you a great amount of media to paint at the right consistency. If you do shake it up, then you will have to apply a few coats over the outline, letting to dry between each application. 

The photo below is how my base looked before adding the photo, title and embellishments.

Next while waiting for the Colour Shimmer Spray and Cube to dry I fussy cut a title and a few words. One of the great things of the Bee Arty Collections is that you can mix and match things from a few different collection. Here I have fussy cut from:

The word "Breathe" from the Breathe patterned paper in the Find Paradise Collection, the words "I Love You Even When You Do Dumb Stuff" from the Love Letter patterned paper in the Chit Chat Collection and the words "Happy Memories" from the Love patterned paper from the Love and Grace Collection.

Next I double matted my photo, I did a thin 2 mm mat with the blue side of the Journey patterned paper from the Aim High Collection and then a 7 mm mat with some of the lime green tones found in the Arty Farty Collection. 

I then adhered the music sheet butterfly in roughly the same position as on the sketch onto my base. Then stuck the matted photo down overlapping the butterfly. At this stage as I was embellishing with the fussy cut butterflies from the Embrace Change collection I decided that they were a bit dark and I wanted to add a pop of colour. So I pulled out some of my very ignored butterfly punches and punched out some from the blue and lime green paper that I used before to mat the photo. Tip: If you don't have butterfly punches you could always stamp the butterflies and emboss them to the colour you want. The Bee Arty Beautiful Butterflies Stamp/Die Set would be perfect for this and at only $10 (available at the time of this post) it is an absolute steal. 

I finished off the layout with some yellow and orange twine tied in bows and adhered the fussy cut words down.

Thanks for popping in and I hope I have inspired you to give the challenge a go and to pull out those collections you and an mix and match.

Hugs

Tracey