Hello, hello, hello!
Erica on the blog today, how are we all doing? Excited about Easter and having a few days off? We don't really do anything special for Easter in our house apart from having some chocolate Easter eggs and I do decorate a little bit. The decorating is more for a spring-y feel as I adore spring with all the flowers that pop up, buds on all the bushes and trees, warmer and longer days. It all makes me happy.
Today's card is yellow and green, which are in my mind typical spring colours. I started out by stamping the Beautiful Bloom-Sweet Rose flower stamp on Strathmore Bristol Vellum water colour paper, I heat embossed it in white as my plan was to use my Derwent Inktense pencils for the colouring. I have neglected these watercolour pencils for a while and thought it would be nice to change things up a little from the Zig markers and Gansai Tambi watercolours I have used a lot recently.
I started with the leaves and with a water colour brush dropped green colour in them and swirled it around a little. Adding more or less water as well as more colour in certain places left a nice, natural look. For the flower itself I used Sherbet Lemon, which is the lightest colour yellow there is, and Mustard for contrast. This bit of colouring was loose and relaxed, I swirled the colours around and added contrasting shades where it would naturally be. When I do watercolouring I always have a piece of tissue on hand and I dabbed up a bit of the excess water and colour where it was too much.
Setting the flower aside to dry, I started on the background which I knew I wanted green. Ink smooching sounded like a fun idea and I tried doing that.... with disastrous results. I couldn't get the colour rich enough, it was too watery and turned into a big mess. Moving on to attemp no2, I used a green Inktense pencil instead but pretty much the same thing happened with that one so I just put it aside with a sigh and moved on to no3. For this one I got the Gansai Tambi water colours out and swish-swoshed some green colour in the middle of the panel and added water going both up and down to create an ombré effect. I still didn't love it and was fast running out of ideas of how to make it work.
At this point I was pretty frustrated and annoyed with the whole thing so I took a break from making the background and looked at my flower again. I decided to add some gold to the flower instead of adding it to the background as one of my ideas had been (which I didn't even try after all the green mishaps) I used Yellow Gold in the Gansai Tambi Starry Colors collection and coloured the whole flower and all the buds instead of just adding highlights. Setting it aside to dry again, I turned my attention back to the background again. Lo and behold, one of the failed attempted actually looked very nice once it was dry!! HA!
I decided to use the 'Happy Birthday' sentiment that is included with the flower and I thought gold heat embossing would look very nice so I did just that. And it did look very nice indeed but it was so wonky! Gah! I ended up having to re-do it on a small banner to cover up that boo-boo. The flower I fussy cut out and not very well in some places I will admit, fussy cutting isn't my strong point. I would absolutely love a co-ordinating die for this stamp!
Adhering the flower and the banner to the card with foam tape for that little extra dimension, I sat back and decided against sequins and used enamel accents instead. I dotted it rather generously in clusters around the flower and then I managed to stop myself from going overboard and adding Nuvo Jewel Drops too. Rather impressive, no? Especially as we all know I'm rather fond of going overboard with he embellishments. Maybe I'm turning a corner?? I guess we will find out in my next post. Although I wouldn't place any bets on it, personally.
Happy Easter and crafting!
PS If you aren't the 'treat yourself to chocolate' kind of person, why not get a new stamp set from Kennedy Grace Creations or have a look at one or two of these gorgeous Photo Boards® I've used for this last photo? I'm both a brand ambassador as well as an affiliate at Photo Boards and I have a personalised 10% off discount code (the code is 'springcraft') that will give me a small commission if you use it, at no extra cost to you whatsoever. How is that for a win-win? The one I used for this photo is called Earl Grey and is a gorgeous soft grey and a tint of lavender. It adds a little something to a photo without being too fussy, it will also give your photos a nice consistency on social media and blogs etc.
Hugs from Erica
Love and Laughter,
I think your background turned out real nice in the end, but I know the feeling you describe that some days it just doesn't work out the way you had in mind!
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