We’ve made a few changes over at Rachel Vass Designs, and we are excited to now bring you monthly releases of 4-5 new sets (rather than a weekly release of 1).

To celebrate the new release today we are having an Instagram Hop where you could win the new release!

If you can’t wait to get creating, the entire release is available NOW over on Rachel’s Etsy shop. We also have a special freebie of some awesome digital download calendars free with purchase for a limited time.

I’ve been SUPER inspired by these new designs and the whole design team has been busy making project inspiration for you, so be sure to hop along to each member for more chances to win.

Starting from today, I will be uploading each of my makes to my blog over the next few days, with details on how I made each one, but here is a sneak peek at each project!

When I first saw this design I loved it, but I’m not too proud to say that I was more than a little intimidated! I don’t have that much experience of colouring skin tones, and if we are talking successful attempts that number probably hits an even 0-0.

I decided to push myself though and see if I could break that fear barrier in my mind and I gotta say, I am so happy that I did.

I sized & positioned my images how I wanted within Silhouette Studio and then created a rounded rectangle cut line to create the card panel I wanted.

In order to begin colouring the hands I first mapped out my shadow areas; I did this using BV000 which is a very pale purple. It was something of an experiment and I really like the way it added depth and shadow to this very light skin shade.

Once I was happy with the positions of my shadows, I then added the other shades over the top, starting with the lightest and moving through to the darker shades. (*By darker I mean the darker shades used within this very pale overall skin tone. I am excited to try a variety of skin tones now; I’m very interested to see whether the technique of adding a roughly complementary colour as the shadow will work on other skin tones too.)

I felt pretty confident colouring the rest of the image in, adding bright pops of orange and pink to the flowers, and a variety of Cool Greys to add some shadow to the teacups, leaving a central highlight to give them a rounded appearance.