June Side Trade - gift tags

Have you ever seen something really cool and think you want to try it. So you go to the store and buy all the materials to make it and then chicken out or just forget about it? No? Me either! Well that's not true. Digging through my supplies, I found packages of different sized gift tags. Whoops. Good thing this challenge came along! So we had to make two different styles to trade. Easy enough. Uh no. It's something new so I have to suffer anxiety over it.

Time to just count out what I need and plow in with materials!

This first set evolved over my dismay at not having achieved a summer day yet! I mean it's almost the end of June and we are barely above 70 this summer! Well my card worked. The projected temps for the next week are in the 90's! 
The sand is from the liquitex sand medium, then dye painted over it. The sky is ink and clouds painted in with acrylic. A hand carved bird stamp and grass stamp complete the look.

Now this tag was a technique driven design. I had some metallic paint from my faux finishing days. It was a sage green color and I troweled it on and stamped into it. That part kind of disappeared. I painted a sunflower yellow ink over the top. Still boring, so I used a stencil in dark purple along the edge, then splattered white acrylic paint with a toothbrush. Next a rubber stamp in sunflower yellow on the opposite side. Dragonfly kept running through my head the entire time I worked on this piece. On a separate piece of paper, I stamped a bunch of dragonflies and used embossing powder in black. When dry, I heat set then colored with markers. I trimmed around the outside edges and glued them to each tag. Still needed just one more element. Black glitter glue to bring out the stenciled dots. That was it. Add a decorative string and ta da!