A Creative Life:

Welcome to the NSD Prima Blog Hop! Prima has a fun-packed day planned with the wonderful Ambassadors, the talented Design Team, and our amazing Educators! We hope the projects inspire you to dig out your crafty supplies and have fun along with us.

Prima will be giving prizes away all day long on ALL of their social media outlets, along with a stunning main prize hosted on the Prima blog, so make sure you hop around and then comment on Prima's blog here! Not only do we have TONS of inspiration, but we are offering free classes too! Want to learn new techniques? Join in on the marathon of "Live With Prima" classes filled with gorgeous projects kicking off at 7 am PT! Click here to watch!

For the blog hop today I have created this fun mixed media piece using one of the new Bloom Girl stamps by Jamie Dougherty. I also wanted to test run the new Prima Bloom Sprays and give them a good test run.

I created this piece by stamping (with Momento Black Ink) onto lightweight bleedproof paper and then colouring her with a mix of Copics and Prismacolor Pencils. I find this is a really fun mix of medias for colouring a stamped image. I should have done it straight on heavy weight copic paper though as I changed my mind on my original design and needed it to be on a heavier base, so adhered to cardstock with Matte Medium, however the light weight paper wrinkled when I did this.

The base was the back of a Prima Paintable, stamped with an older Prima music note stamp (536312), then sprayed with a combination of the following Prima Bloom Sprays - Soft Teal (573782), Peony (573904), Gold Foil (573805). I also used these sprays over the Prima Resist Canvas Sheet. All the flowers and lace on the project were coloured with the same sprays as I used all white flowers and sprayed them all to see how the Bloom Sprays work on different textures etc.

So how did I find the Prima Bloom Sprays? I will admit, I was a bit of a skeptic at first, as I like the sprays I use at the moment but there are some wonderful advantages with the Prima Bloom Sprays.

1) The spray handle and nozzle is BRILLIANT!! It sprays in perfect circles each time, with every different bottle I open and use, it is perfect. There was no clogging at any point with any of the bottles and one of them I used heavily in a class that morning (used close to half the bottle)

2) The spray handle makes it far easier to pump the spray out. There is no fatigue in your hands when using sprays a lot. The little blue lock also ensures that you can protect your bottle when in transit from accidentally spraying.

3) Love that it has a little ball bearing in the bottle to ensure that the spray fluid is always mixed easily. You swirl the bottle around for a bit and then you hear the ball bearing and you know that all the sediment from the mica has been mixed in properly before spraying.

4) Because it always sprays evenly, colouring the flowers, lace etc was made particularly easy as when you aimed the nozzle at the flower, that is where the spray ended up! Same when spraying larger areas, you are not left with half moon areas from a dodgy nozzle, it goes down so evenly.

5) Has a thicker creamy texture than some sprays, so colours don't muddy quite as much. But you can also spray some onto a teflon mat and combine colours to create new colours. I found it better to combine on the mat and then dip/paint the flower with the new colour.

6) Prima Bloom Sprays also dry to an amazing shimmer which is super pretty and they worked well on all the different surfaces I tried, including Primas Shabby Chic Resins.

All in all I think you really need to try one to see how far superior the spray nozzle is. It really is like nothing else on the market.