Altenew Layer Stamps - Vintage Flowers

Happy Wednesday!  I hope you've all had a great week so far.  I got a bit of fun stuff in the mail yesterday - my new sets of Altenew Stamps!!  I was so excited to check them out and see for myself just how cool they are in person.  

I don't know if you've seen these yet or not but many of the Altenew stamps sets are what I like to call layer stamps - images that are built up using 2 or more stamps to create a dimensional look to the finished image.  Stampin' Up used to have lots of these types of stamps - they may still but I haven't seen a SU caty in years.

I have been wanting these for a while now - Simon Says Stamp has them but the sets I wanted were never in stock at the same time so I got an email last week saying that HallmarkScrapbook was carrying them now PLUS they were all in stock AND cheaper than SSS!  Can't beat that ;)

I got the Scribbled Flowers, Painted Flowers, Whimsical Flowers, Vintage Flowers and Vintage Roses.    Now I'm not gonna lie to you - these are a bit more complicated and time consuming than an ordinary stamp.  If you're willing to put in some practice and have a bit of patients you'll be rewarded with some beautiful images.  They are NOT as easy to stamp with as some people make them sound.  You need several shades of each color you want to use and very good lighting (which I don't really have).

When you initially get the stamps you'll want to draw some lines around all of the parts.  The Vintage Roses set already has guide lines which indicate the parts and pieces that go together which is a must because they all look very confusing other wise.  The rest of the sets I bought didn't have those lines so I took a bit of time and searched the Altenew blog to see which parts go with each flower/leave and drew circles around the parts that went together.  There is still one set - the Whimsical Flowers that I need to find good directions for but the rest I have figured out.

Today I wanted to show you the Vintage Flowers set.  This is one of the sets I had to draw my own lines around each of the layered sets.  I am using Memento Inks - Angel Pink, Rose Bud, Rhubarb Stalk and Tuxedo Black for the main roses.

In this set there are two large roses - I am pointing to the 4 layer rose which has a black outline as the 4th stamp (below my finger).  The other rose is the one at the top which has 3 layers.  

I started off with the 4 layer rose first - I've seen several videos on which stamp to start with and best as I can come up with...start with whatever works for you.  Seems like everyone starts with a different stamp so experiment.   For this rose I started with the Black outline - it helped me align the images better.  Next I stamped the base color which should be stamped with the lightest color of ink.

I then added the shading which is the mid-tone ink color.  I messed up a bit and didn't have it lined up perfectly which you'll see in the next photo...

You see that the mid-tone is a bit wonky going off to one side a bit.  This is where the good lighting comes in... it really showed up when I stamped the final detail layer with the darkest color of ink.

So I stamped it a second time and it turned out much better!

This set also has lots of smaller flowers and two sets of leaves - each with an outline, base and shading.  There are 4 sizes of the rounded petal flowers (small blue flower) and 5 sizes of the flower that looks like a violet (blue & purple examples).  This example also shows what the second rose looks like - it has 3 layers, no black outline and one of the leaf sets.

And here's what I did with them....

I made this card using the CAS sketch #54.   I used both of the roses and leaf sets and several of the smaller flowers for the background strip.  The sentiment comes from the Scribbled Flowers set.

I am entering this into the CAS on Sunday Sketch #54 Challenge.