February Guest Designer: Zinia Amoiridou

Hello, everyone and welcome to our February Guest Designer post!

Well, do we have a treat for you today! We have the lovely Zinia Amoiridou as our February Guest Designer and she will be sharing some amazingly beautiful projects with you. So here are what she has for us today:

Hello everyone! My name is Zinia and I'm a designer, illustrator and paper addict from Greece. I’ve always been a creative kid. My favorite time of the year was back to school season where I could grab a bunch of new colorful pens and stationery. I'm madly in love with all sorts of paper crafting and art supplies and I love collecting them as much as I like using them. My favorite things are ice cream, taking pictures, art journaling, designing craft supplies, teaching classes and spreading sprinkles of craftiness and inspiration with the rest of the world.

So, on to Zinia's projects!

I was extremely inspired by the “Our Family” collection and couldn’t really decide where to start. So I just picked my top favorite papers and I built my designs around them.

My first pick was the beautiful rainbow striped pattern. I really wanted to use the stripes as a guideline and add color-coordinating embellishments on top of them. My first step was to pick inks that were close enough in color to that paper. This wasn’t very hard to do since the Altenew Crisp Dye inks come in so many beautiful colors. I chose to use the Super Script Scrapbook Stamp and Die to create die-cut words in the coordinating colors. The plan was to place each word on top of the matching color.

 

To give even more interest to the whole design, I decided to take things a step further. I used the same ink colors and stamped some words straight on the striped paper for a tone on tone effect. I tried to ink up my stamps well so they give a good impression with the first application. This way I can achieve a lighter shade than if I had to double-stamp them.

To make my composition more balanced I cut off around one-third of the pattern and then mounted the bigger piece onto a piece of white cardstock. The white edges made the striped pattern pop even more and they also gave me the space to add another fun element. I used the same colors of Altenew Crisp Dye inks, dabbed some color on my acrylic block and added a little bit of water. Then I picked that color with my paintbrush and added some splatters on the bigger white cardstock border in the same color order as the pattern. That added a more painterly effect and of course an interesting texture to the dull white edge.

When all that was done, I just built a small cluster with beautiful floral ephemera and wood veneer pieces around my photo to help it pop against the colorful background. I didn’t really want to make it busy cause I wanted my inky techniques to be the spotlight on this layout.

Stunning, right?!?! And Zinia's next layout is just as breathtaking!

The second paper I absolutely loved from this collection was the beautiful Painted Wreath. Now, if you already have a bunch of gorgeous Altenew floral stamp sets you can totally make a similar design using your own stamps. But if you are more like me and you are looking for a shortcut to save some time, this paper is just dreamy. Even though you have a gorgeous base to work on, you can still customize it and make it completely your own.

My first step was to use the little stamp set that comes in the “Our Family” collection and stamp a few DIY die-cut ephemera pieces. I chose a variety of pinks, purples, and reds that match the colors of my existing wreath base. You can do this step with any Altenew floral stamp set you have. I just chose this little cutie cause it worked really well with the rest of the flowers on the paper.

To add an even more personal touch to the style of this wreath, I picked the Build-A-Flower: Coral Charm stamp set and used the leaf outline. I wanted to add my leaves in black and white for extra contrast and to create a unique look compared to the style we started with.

When all my elements were stamped and cut I just started placing things around the wreath. I prefer to add my embellishments on the page without adhesive at first until I’m sure of the placement so I can try different things before I commit to the final design. I also used a few of the beautiful floral die-cut embellishments that come pre-made in the collection.

For the title, I used a mix of the gorgeous watercolor chipboard letters and a die-cut word. To finish it up, I wrote down my journaling and I added some splatters with Altenew Crisp Dye inks like I did in the first layout.

All we can say is ‘WOW‘!

How stunning are Zinia's layouts? We absolutely loved them! We hope you enjoyed Zinia’s projects as much as we do. Also, make sure to visit Zinia’s Blog to see more and don’t forget to give her some love.

Thank you so much Zinia for being our February Guest Designer and sharing your talent with us today! It was such a lovely treat to gaze at your gorgeous layouts.