ATC Saturday: Mortise Masks

The challenge this week:  Use a mortise mask.

You can think of a mortise mask as the "field" surrounding your image.  Some people think of it as the "negative mask".  For the ATC below, the mortise mask was large enough to cover the whole ATC, but with a bird-shaped hole cut out of it.  Sorry I didn't take photos of the process, but hopefully it makes sense.

Perhaps a sage outline around the bird would've been better?

The lines of music were stamped first, with a mortise mask (which had the shape of a bird cut from it) in place.  After removing the mortise mask, a traditional mask was used to cover the (now bird-shaped) music image.  Using a large background stamp, I filled in the rest of the ATC with the botanical flourish.  Finally, I outlined the bird shape with a micron pen, and punched a tiny hole to represent the bird's eye.

I have to admit when I think about the time it took to achieve this effect, I marvel at how simple it would be to do via PhotoShop!  Virtual "cutting" is so much quicker, lol.  On the bright side, I liked the design enough to stamp a few all-occasion greeting cards in addition to this ATC.