Laurie Johnson 1/1/21 Laurie Johnson 1/1/21

Tim Holtz Holiday Village die with Northern lights

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I was so happy to finally be able to purchase this Holiday Village Die by Tim Holtz and get it in time for a January card. I had this idea several weeks ago to paint the Northern Lights on a card and had so much fun playing with this design.

So to begin with I was inspired to make the village in shades of blue by layersofink.blogspot.com and this post.

But I changed a few things as I went along. I love how she outlined the buildings to emphasize them but I wanted to try using a brush and shading them with distress ink just to see how that would look and I loved it! It really helps define the buildings and I’ve circled a couple of good examples below. I had never used a brush with distress ink before and will definitely by playing with this technique again.

I started with black holographic paper for the walkways because I knew my scene was a night scene and I was picturing light reflecting off of ice on the walkways. I thought this also might be cool for the windows but in the end I didn’t like it so I used gold metallic paper instead for most of them. I just love all the reflections off of the metallic papers.

For the Northern Lights, I grabbed the scrap of watercolor paper I had left over from cutting out the village snow pieces and started inking it up. Before I forget, below are the colors of distress ink I used since it’s hard to see the labels on my ink pads.

Chipped Sapphire, Mermaid Lagoon, Blueprint Sketch, Wilted Violet, Lucky Clover, Black Soot and Twisted Citron

I used a q-tip and Twisted Citron to draw the basic line of the lights then with upward sweeping motion I started painting with Twisted Citron then Lucky Clover and working my way up to Mermaid Lagoon, Wilted Violet and Blueprint Sketch and this is how it started looking. (I’m thinking I might try to upload a short video of this - comment below if you’re interested.)

I inked the bottom and top edges with Black Soot and a mix of the other colors to give contrast between teh village and the background, but I also wanted to bring out the highlights you so often see with Northern Lights. So I used white acrylic paint, watered down a little, and started painting the white streaks with a brush and blending them with my finger so they would mix a little with the distress ink and not leave harsh lines. I should have worked a little faster to do this better or maybe thin out my white paint a little more but here is how my first attempt turned out.

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I didn’t take any photos of this part but I splattered white paint with a toothbrush for snow and stars and used black Archival ink to stamp some trees from Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous Mini Holidays 2 CMS096 and Just Believe CMS031 which has the same tree in two sizes that helped me make them dimensional. (Sorry for the glare on the photo.)

I cut a wavy edged piece of watercolor paper and embossed it with the same embossing ink I used for the snow on the village, Snowflake Tinsel by Ranger.

For the second layer I inked the edges of the bottom of the card with various shades of the blues and purples and used the same embossing ink for the edges of the top part of this layer so that the contrast colors would be opposite from the top layer. In other words, so that where it is blue on the top layer, there is white underneath and visa versa. Hope this makes sense:)

Then I stitched around the middle layer with silver thread and the top layer with blue thread.

I used mixed media paper for the card itself and added a layer of dark blue paper on top (so white for the card, dark blue layer, painted layer and top layer), glued them all together and voila! My card is done. Super fun!