Creating Art with CASology!

I'm excited...

Yay! Deirdre from the CASology design team was nice enough to select this card as the winner of their ROW challenge. That means I get to play along with the talented team for this cue: 

We were away from home for a few days when I got the news I would be playing along, which meant I had lots of time to mull over ideas. A few of them that were ultimately rejected:
- flowers and a nature quote, since nature is a fine artist
- an art-related quote from an artist
- a card with Art Garfunkel on it
- etc.
After all that, I ended up with this:

Design defined: Few or no embellishments
help to keep a card CAS.

I started by stamping this Crazy Cat on watercolour paper. I die cut the tail from the sticky part of a post-it so I could mask it and stamp the brush. Once I'd done that, I realized that it was more complicated than simple masking; I wanted the brush on top of one part of the tail and under the second part. The easiest work-around was to make the brush handle solid black. :D Once I'd watercoloured the cat, I stamped the paint splash in ombré ink, then stamped and embossed the sentiment. Hey, did you know that even after a couple of minutes, ombré ink, despite not being pigment ink, will still hold embossing powder? I know this now. ;) Because of that fun effect, I added a little Versamarker to the paint drip on the brush and embossed that, too. Finding a patterned paper that coordinated perfectly with my kitty for the card base once again justifies me keeping ALL of my paper pads. 

Lots of amazing ART inspiration can be seen over on the CASology blog. You have until Monday at noon central time (one pm for me in the eastern time zone) to play along! 

Supplies: white cardstock, Strathmore watercolour paper, Studio Calico Memoir patterned paper, Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous Crazy Cats & Crazy Things stamps & die, Paper Smooches Nine Lives & Neat & Tangled Ink Splash stamps, Memento Luxe tuxedo black, My Favorite Thinks black licorice & Hero Arts neon ombré chartreuse to blue inks, Zing clear embossing powder, Zig watercolour markers, Versamarker