Bumblebees and Butterflies: August 2026

Tuesday, 25 August 2026

Monochrome 2

A project for Country View Crafts

August Challenge Monochrome Part 2

In my last post I shared the first monochrome project for the FaceBook CVC Challenge group, this is now the continuation and the second page in my creative sketchbook. Please do look back to that post to see how I started the process of building my choice of colours for my distress palette.

Find it here - http://www.bumblebeesandbutterflies.com/2026/08/monochrome-1.html

Having previously made palettes to show some tints, tones and shades of walnut stain (see last post), I then used them to chose 5 vintage brown distress inks to work with as a very simple monochromatic palette of brown distress products to create the projects.

For this page I chose to go totally vintage not just in colours but in the elements I have used. Starting with Tim Holtz papers and pieces that I had made that were left over from other projects or experiments.

The background

The focal point - one of Tim's Found Relatives.

Elements, stamped, die-cut, inked and printed.

The pieces put together.

The two pages together.

Thanks for stopping by,

Supplies

Tim Holtz Distress Inks --- Antique Linen, Vintage Photo, Walnut Stain, Ground Espresso, and Scorched Timber, Picket Fence

Tim Holtz Distress Oxides - Antique Linen, Vintage Photo, Walnut Stain, Ground Espresso, and Scorched Timber

Tim Holtz Distress Sprays - Antique Linen, Vintage Photo, Walnut Stain, Ground Espresso, and Scorched Timber

Tim Holtz - Idea-ology - Remnant Rubs, Photobooth, Found Relatives

Ranger Archival Ink - Coffee, distress vintage photo, distress ground espresso

Tim Holtz Stencils - Mini Deco Floral set 60

49 & Market - Ticket Essentials

Arden - Makers Series - Field Notes Meadow

Versafine Clair --- Pinecone

Distress ink palette designed by me

Monday, 10 August 2026

Monochrome 1

A project for Country View Crafts

August Challenge Monochrome Part 1

Monochrome: A noun or description for an image, painting, or photograph that consists of a single base hue along with its various tones, tints, and shades.

Monochromatic: Is the specific technique of building a color palette using only one base hue, modified by adding black (to create shades), white (to create tints), or grey (to create tones). For example, a "monochromatic blue" painting uses only light sky blues, deep navy blues, and everything in between.

Page 1 in my Creative Sketchbook that I have been using for my workshops.

For those people who have taken part in my workshops recently they will have created colour palettes for mixing paints, created palettes to show tints and shades of different colours, and made their own little swatch tabs for arty embellishments.

I have also now created a grid to record palettes of tints, tones and shades .......

..... and completed them using walnut stain distress paint as the main focus colour with Paperartsy, black, white and grey paints and here are some of the different variations of colours I made.

I took out these colours of distress inks, distress oxides and distress sprays - Antique Linen, Vintage Photo, Walnut Stain, Ground Espresso, and Scorched Timber to use as my monochromatic distress palette......

.... and made three small panels to produce monochrome projects. Later when laying out the elements on the page I decided to add another one.

I love experimenting with colours and products so decided I would use the monochromatic palettes, swatches and small designs to put together two pages in my Creative Sketchbook under the heading of Monochrome. You can see the finished page 1 above.

The long horizontal and wide stamped border at the bottom is good old fashioned parcel tape that you wet the back of and stick down.

Here are close ups of the elements used. I created the words myself.