The Joyful Soul Creates

The last few cards I’ve made have been more on the masculine side, so today I thought I’d make a more feminine one. The digi stamp I used is not my normal preference for images – I usually like to have cute animals, or sometimes flowers, but something about these tea cups really appealed to me. Plus they have a butterfly, and I do like butterflies on my cards!

I started by printing out the Vintage Tea Cups stamp from The Paper Shelter onto some alcohol ink friendly paper. This is actually not the paper I usually use. I ran out recently and ended up getting the only thing I could find without ordering online. It’s a bit lighter weight than what I’m used to working.

I then got started on my colouring using Yosoo alcohol markers. I wanted the tea cups to appear white so I added shading to them with my lightest yellow grey marker. I used a slightly darker shade of yellow grey in areas where I felt it was needed, such as inside the cups. I used reds for all the hearts, with a slightly lighter shade being used on those hearts outside of the shadow areas. I used blues and blue greens in the same way to colour the decoration on the middle cup.

For the leaves I used a variety of greens, and I chose yellow for the rose. I actually had a pink rose in mind going in to the colouring, but none of my markers are suitable shades to do that. Yellow was the next best option!

When it came to the butterfly I wanted to use it to help to tie all the other elements together. To that end I used yellow from the rose, and red, green and blue green from the cups.  Once I had finished all the colouring I went over the rose, butterfly, and the decorative elements on the cup with my Wink of Stella. I also added some highlights to the cups using my white gel pen.

I trimmed down my focal panel and began working on the other elements of my card. I found some patterned paper that I’ve never used before from my stash and decided I would use that as the colours worked well with those I had used on my focal panel. I trimmed it down to make a strip for one side of my card panel. After laying the focal image on top of it I wasn’t quite happy with the way it looked. I decided to mat it on a piece of pink paper, which actually is the other side of the striped paper I had used for my panel.

The final element I wanted to create was a sentiment panel. I knew I wanted a small circle if possible, so I looked through my stamps to see if I could find something that would work. I found the “someone special” stamp from the Papermania Little Meow stamp set. I didn’t want to use white for the sentiment panel so I cut down another piece of NBUS paper with my smallest Sizzix circle die. I applied glue all around the outer edges and dipped it into glitter. After leaving it to dry for a little while I stamped the sentiment onto the circle. Even with my MISTI I had some trouble getting it to stamp clearly.

I used tape runner to adhere my striped panel to my card base, and also to adhere the image panel to its mat. I then adhered the matted image panel with foam tape, and used more foam tape to adhere the sentiment circle.

I’m quite pleased with this card. The colouring was fun to do and I think it turned out well. I did have some trouble with my alcohol markers bleeding in places and I think that may be because of the paper I am using. The patterned paper coordinates nicely given that I hadn’t picked it out when I initially chose the colours for my image.

Love,

Lady Joyful

P.S., you can now follow me on Instagram where you can get sneaky peeks at what I’m working on, and maybe even the occasional cat picture! And of course you can still find me on Facebook and YouTube!

Challenges included:

Fusion Card Challenge – Image/Sketch

Mod Squad Challenge – Leaves

NBUS Challenge – Anything Goes With NBUS (The “never-before-used-schtuff” I used were the patterned papers and the digi stamp.)

Simon Says Stamp Monday – Shimmer and Sparkle

The Paper Shelter – Make It Digital