Winter Snow Blues

'Winter Snow Blues' by Neil Burley

I chose 'Snowflake 1' from our lovely sponsor LEJ Designs for the centrepiece of my 'Winter Blues' card this month. I converted the artwork to a cut file for my new Silhouette Cameo electronic cutter and cut various sizes of the snowflake from my favourite card for ProMarkers (Ryman's bright white coated card 200gsm). Tips for conversion and cutting are below.

I added some ProMarker colour to start off my blues, using Powder Blue, and layering it several times along edges. For some of the flakes, I misted with Cosmic Shimmer Pearl Mist, another I used Rock Candy Distress Glitter (on spray glue) and another I used Ranger Antique Frosted Crystal embossing powder. All of them had a similar sparkly finish, so it's personal preference at the end of the day!

For the background I used a square of watercolour paper and then added Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink using a blending tool, grading it to a corner. I dried it and then added another layer to deepen the shadows in the bottom right before finally adding a small amount of Dusty Concord Distress Ink at the corner to darken it further. I dried it off again and then spritzed with Cosmic Shimmer French Navy Mist to add a bit of bling.

After matting it all together, I added some self-adhesive clear crystals and coloured them in with French Navy and Azure ProMarkers. Peel-off markers will work just as well.

Instructions for importing digistamp into Silhouette Studio:

1. Open up the saved .jpg file in Silhouette Studio
2. Open the 'Trace Window' and select trace area to surround the image
3. For an outline, I set High Pass Filter to 25, Threshold to 0% and Scale to 4
4. Now click on 'Trace' - this will create a cut line either side of the outline, but does mean the inner octagon sections will be drawn too
5. Click on the original image and delete it
6. Now right click on the cut lines and select 'Release Compound Path'
7. Next delete the inner set of the double outlines - select each line in turn. You may find it easier to zoom in.
8. Now select everything that's left, right click it and then click on 'Group'
9. You now have a cut line for the outline which can be duplicated and resized as you choose.

When cutting, aim to have the 'Thickness' setting mid-way rather than high, which may mean increasing the blade number by one. I found that this helped stop the fine cutouts welding to the sticky mat, particularly as the coated paper was so smooth! My blade settings for Ryman 200gsm Bright White Coated Card were: blade - 3, speed - 9, thickness - 20.