Challenge 26, Week Three

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We hope that you are enjoying the current Challenge, and the inspiration provided by the Design Team. For those of you visiting the blog for the first time, take a look around, and check out the tabs at the top of the page, where you should be able to find the answers to all of your questions. Here is the colour swatch for this month's challenge:

You can find a link to the current challenge here, where you can add your entries at the end of the post. This week, we have some more fabulous inspiration from the Design Team. Magda has created a beautiful Home card, using a combination of stamps.

Anne has created a Christmas canvas, which would be a wonderful piece to bring out every year.

She has very kindly written a tutorial so that you can have a go at making this yourselves.

Materials:
Stamp sets: Christmas Decorations, Words of Inspiration, Sparkling Trees, Christmas Candlelight
25 x 20 primed canvas board, white stamping card, black card, and scrap acetate
Embossing folder with Baroque style design
Snowflake stencil
Inkpads: Distress Ink (Mustard Seed), Versamark, StazOn (Jet Black)
Embossing powder black sparkle glitter
Black gesso
Acrylic paints: black, green
Viva Decor Croco Crackling colour Teal green Kristall Gel clear holographic glitter gel
Glitter pens: red, green, yellow, gold
Glitter glue: red, green, gold
Glossy Aceents, Chunky gold glitter, PVA pearls: gold
Gilding wax: gold
Embellishments: berries, twigs, gold chain, red organza ribbon

Instructions:
Emboss black card with embossing folder and rub over with gilding wax. Trim to make background panel.
Brush the canvas with black acrylic, leaving some background canvas texture showing through, dry completely.
Sponge Distress Ink into spaces.
Apply crackle paste in corners and around the edges and leave to dry overnight. Brush over the top with green acrylic, (the paste was not the correct colour green). Drop some chunky glitter onto the wet paint.
Glue down the embossed background panel. Stamp the sentiment with gold acylic and outline with green glitter pen. Apply Glossy Accents.

Stamp the bauble diamond nine times onto white card with Versamark and heat emboss with black sparkle powder. Colour the card with Distress Ink. Colour the baubles with glitter pens. Cut out and glue to canvas with 3D glue gel. Add Glossy Accents to enhance the baubles.

Apply Kristall Gel to the canvas through the stencil. Also apply to scrap acetate, dry overnight and cut out.

Stamp the lantern and reindeer onto white card. Colour with Distress Ink and Glitter pens. Cut out and glue to canvas. Add Glossy Accents.

Stamp the gem decorations onto acetate with StazOn. Colour the back with glitter glues. Leave to dry overnight. Paint the back with black gesso, cut out and glue to canvas. Add gold hanging chains and gold glitter flue to finials.
Glue down the berries and twigs, which were already decorated with fake snow. Add a bit more sparkle with gold glitter glue. Finally glue down the acetate snowflakes. Add PVA pearls and drop on gold glitter.


Thanks so much Anne, for your detailed explanation.

We hope that the projects that we have shown you this week will inspire you to join in with the challenge yourselves. We will be back next week with another post, and some more projects for you. If you have any questions, and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comment section.

Challenge 26, Week Two- Time to Announce Our Winners!

Hello everyone, welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. This week, we are announcing the winners of our Anniversary Challenge, number Twenty-Five. The winner of the £25 prize to spend at Chocolate Baroque is Pat, whose project was drawn by Random.org as the overall winner. Congratulations Pat, we hope that you enjoy your prize.

Please email Lesley on lesley@chocolatebaroque.com so that she can organise your voucher. You can also display our Winner's badge on your blog, details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of the page.

The Top Three this month have been chosen by the Design Team, who have had great fun looking at all of your chocolate themed projects. They had a tough choice picking just three entries from such a fabulous selection, a bit like choosing a favourite chocolate from the chocolate box! The Top Three in no particular order are:

Janny:

Shelagh:

 

Gerrina:

Congratulations ladies, you can display the Top Three badge on your blogs. Details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of the page. Well done to everyone who entered, and we hope that you will enter our current challenge. You can find the details here.

We have more Design Team inspiration for you this week.

Asha has created a colourful Christmas Art Journal page. The spicy colours work perfectly for her chosen theme.

Magda has created two projects for us this week; the first, a colourful book cover, using a gelli plate background, and some modern flowers for decoration:

The second, a friendship card, using an Art Nouveau image, and the sentiment matches perfectly:

Zoe has created a pretty floral tag, with stunning dark accents:

We hope that these projects will inspire you to create something for the challenge yourself, and join in with our colourful creativity. We will be back next week with another post, and more projects from the Design Team, but until then, we look forward to seeing more of your entries. If you have any questions, and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.

Challenge Twenty-Six

Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your support over the past month, during our Anniversary celebrations, we hope that you enjoyed the chocolate theme, and playing along with us as we inspired you with our chocolate creations. We really appreciate your visits to our blog, and enjoy reading your lovely comments. We will be announcing the winners of Challenge Twenty-Five next week, so if you entered the challenge last month, please be sure to check the announcement, to see if you are the winner of our prize.

As a reminder to those of you who have visited our blog before, and for anyone who is new to the blog, our challenges are monthly, based on an inspirational photo and a colour swatch. A new challenge is launched on the third Wednesday of every month. You can use any medium to create your project; inks, paints, pens, pencils, etc., as long as you stick to the colours from the colour swatch in your project. We are offering a monthly prize og £15 to spend on Chocolate Baroque stamps to one lucky winner, who will be selected by Random.org from all of the entrants who have used Chocolate Baroque stamps currently available from the website. We welcome entries incorporating other stamps and images, but they will not be eligible for the prize. All entries will have the chance to be selected as one of our Top Three, and can then display our 'I made the Top Three at Chocolate Baroque' badge on their blog.

We have a fabulous new colour swatch for you to use this month, and some beautiful inspiration from the Design Team, which we will be bringing to you over the coming weeks. Here is the colour swatch for the new challenge:

The challenge will close at 12.00 p.m. on Tuesday 20th September 2016, and the winner will be announced on Wednesday 28th September 2016. Here are some projects from the Design Team:

Claire's wooden plaque incorporates one of our new individual lady stamps and some additional poppies. Lovely embellishments complete the project:

Julie's pretty card uses a punky heart and butterfly, beautifully coloured against her fabulous dotty backgrouund:

Magda's tag is richly coloured, and she has used glossy accents on the foliage for extra dimension:

Her second project is a lovely CAS card incorporating a dimensional flower alonside one of our pretty fairy images:

Thank you so much girls for your inspiration using the new challenge colours. We hope that they will encourage you to have a rummage through your own crafty supplies and create something yourselves, and enter the challenge. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our challenge blog team. You can get in touch by sending a private message. Details are at the end of this post below the comments section.

We hope that you enjoy the new challenge, and look forward to seeing your projects, Judith xx

An InLinkz Link-up

Challenge Twenty-Five, Week Four

Hello everyone, and welcome to the final week of our Anniversary Challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your visits and lovely comments throughout the month. Your best wishes have really been appreciated, and we hope that you will continue to follow along with us as we head into our third year of colourful challenges and creative fun. We hope that you have been enjoying the challenge and the inspiration provided by the Design Team this month, there is still plenty of time to enter the challenge. Remember, there is a bumper prize of a £25 voucher on offer this month, all the more reason to get creative and enter the challenge! You can add your entry to the link in this post.

This week, we are taking a look at the entries that we have received for the current challenge, and showcasing them on the blog. We have not received so many entries this month, perhaps the different format threw some of you a bit, as you are so used to our colour swatches. Don't worry, we will be back to normal next month! Anyway, we have decided that because we love chocolate so much, that we are going to show all of the entries that we have received so far, it was too difficult to decide which ones to leave out.

Kate has created a chocolate orange inspired card, using the Tangled Birch stamp:

Shelagh has chosen a chocolate honeycomb theme for her hexagonal easel card:

Jan has created a super card using all sorts of chocolate flavours, and the added texture looks like chocolate chips-delicious!

Dotstolines have created a chocolate box covered in handmade chocolate embellishments that look good enough to eat:

Joan's rich chocolate coloured tag, complete with chocolate cupcake, and sparkly cherry, is a delicious addition to the challenge entries:

Janny has chosen to use the strawberry and caramel colours in the chocolate photo from our anniversary post, she has mixed dark and white chocolate elements to complete the design:

Gerrina's card combines some fabulous textures; cork and hessian for the leaves, which are very unusual. The CAS design is super, with a lovely sentiment, and a scattering of dragonflies in the background.

This month, we are introducing you to Magda, one of our newest Design Team members.

Hallo ladies, I am Magda and I live in Italy. I have been on the Chocolate Baroque Design Team since April 2016. I have been using Chocolate Baroque stamps since 2013, and used to sell them when I ran my own craft business.

For many years before I had a craft business, I dedicated myself to different hobbies until I started to look at Art History with my Son and Daughter, to modify the drawings, and to be scolded by the Professor who recognised my 'paw' every time. It was fun for me to discover the use of colour and at the same time, materials and techniques that I did not know.

Then one day, by chance, came the turning point...It was near to 1990, with our children, we were visiting Parma Cathedral. At the time, they had just finished the interior restoration of the dome. For a few days, you could walk on the scaffolding up, up, up, a few metres from the Correggio frescoes to admire the work of the recently concluded resoration.

At that precise moment, I found myself so wrapped up in the dome, among the paintings, that I could almost touch them, to see so closely all the different nuances, the vibrant colours of the frescoes, appreciate the enormous size of the figures, the endless details. To be near you, from the bottom, creating the illusion of heaven and earth and of infinite perspective. That indescribable thrill!!

The result was so inevitable; I started my journey of artistic training, courses in drawing and painting, composition, colour, form study, study of styles and art history....This path, although started more than twenty years ago, not yet completed! Knowledge of languages, travels in Italy and abroad, and the people that I have had the pleasure to meet during my explorations, have helped me to develop my own way, influencing my thinking and expanding the knowledge of my techniques... and to open the business.

Now I am playing with blue, yellow, red, green, purple, violet, orange; I am fond of all of the colours and their combinations, as well as Mixed Media, but I don't like repetitive work. I have fun in creating the basis on which to continue various techniques. This leads to ever changing results that may be similar in colour combinations, but never the same in form and composition.

I hope that you enjoy knowing something about me, and I will be very pleased to hear from you and see your artwork, Magda.

Magda has created a super project especially for the Anniversary Challenge; a chocolate box, complete with three 'bars' of chocolate inside, one of each flavour. They look good enough to eat. She has used an Art Nouveau style flower from the Nouveau Lovebirds stamp set as her central motif.

Thank you Magda, for your lovely project, and it was great, getting to know you too!

Sadly, we did not hear from the winner of our Design Team prize a few weeks ago, and so we have redrawn a winner, using Random.org. The new winner is Janice Stone. Congratulations, Janice, your prize will be on its way to you as soon as possible.

We will be back next wee with a brand new challenge, but hope to see lots more chocolate themed entries for our current challenge in the meantime. Don't forget, if you have any questions, and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section. 

Challenge Twenty-Five, Week Three

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We hope that you are enjoying our Anniversary Challenge and the wonderful inspiration provided by the Design Team. For those of you visiting the blog for the first time, take a look around, read our FAQ tab at the top of the page, but for this month, as an exception to our usual colour swatches, we are simply using the theme of 'CHOCOLATE' for our monthly challenge. You can create any kind of project; a card, tag, scrapbook page, mixed media, project, whatever you like, as long as you incorporate chocolate colours into the design. You can add other colours as well if you like, so think of ice cream combinations perhaps, like mint chocolate, chocolate orange, or neopolitan, for example. The idea is to have fun and enjoy yourselves!

You can find a link to the current challenge here, where you can add your entries at the end of the post.

This week, we have some more chocolate inspired inspiration from the Design Team for you.

Julie's card has a beautiful textured background that looks just like thick white chocolate. A fabulous flower in chocolate tones adds a finishing touch:

Magda has created a mixed media card, creating layers of ink and tissue paper with a glue resist for a lovely milk chocolate finish to her background:

Asha has created a colourful Art Journal page with chocolate overtones. Asha says that this page was inspired by mango, raspberry and passionfruit sorbet that she had eaten, sounds delicious!

Zoe has created two beautiful cards using a shaving foam technique. The second card was made from the leftover inks, which is why the background is paler. Zoe has called the colour combinations caramel ripple and milk chocolate ripple, they sound fabulous!

Zoe has very kindly written a tutorial for her cards so that you can have a go at making them yorselves.

Materials:

Paper plate
Cheap shaving foam
Spray inks- three colours
Stamps: Lace Fragments, Journal Today, Eccentric Edwardian, Gothic Fragments
Bookmark die cut
Purple card stock
Versafine Onyx Black inkpad
Kraft card blank 6" x 6"
White card blank 5" x 7"

Instructions:

Cover the paper plate with a layer of shaving foam, spray three colours of spray inks onto the foam, (more than three colours is too much).
Using a coffee stirrer or something similar, drag the colours through the foam, up and down in one direction, and then across in the other direction until it starts to look like marbling. Once you like what you see stop, because if you overdo the stirring process, you will just get a mixed up colour.
Put the card onto the foam, press down and wait a few seconds before lifting. Lift the card away and after a few seconds, take a ruler and scrape off the foam and put it back on the plate. Using a paper towel, wipe off the rest of the foam and leave the card to dry. the card will only take anout five minutes to dry.
Flatten the foam on the plate and stir again, there should be enough colour for a second print, which will be paler and more subtle. Take a second print as before.
Cut the marbled card to size and stamp the corners from the Lace Fragments stamp set directly onto the card.
Stamp a sentiment onto the bookmark die, and ink the edges with Distress Ink. Fold over the edge of the card at one side.
Add some gold glitter pen highlights to the scroll lacy corners here and there.
This card is called Caramel Ripple ice cream!

The paler card is called Milk Chocolate Ripple ice cream.
Stamp the image from the Gothic Fragments stamp set in the two opposite corners, using second generation stamping, and orange ink, (ink up your stamp, and stamp onto scrap paper first, before then stamping onto your card to get a lighter impression). Use a black ink for the alphabet stamp in the same way.
Stamp the head, sentiment and clock, using black ink over the background.
Ink around the edges with Distress Ink to frame the card.

Mat both backgrounds onto purple card before adhering to the card blanks.

Thank you Zoe for your fabulous tutorial, and thank you to the rest of the Design Team girls for their brilliant designs. We hope that they will inspire you to join in with the challenge yourselves. We will be back next week with another post, and some more projects for you. If you have any questions, and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.