Birthday: Twin rainbow

It’s that time of year again, when I have to come up with an idea for cards for twins. I’ve been playing with foil and Minc mist recently, so I thought I’d put the experimenting to good use and create a foil rainbow across the two cards as a background for some Copic colouring.

How:

First create your rainbow. Or in this case, first design two stencils that will interleave to create a rainbow that covers an A5 sheet of card. I wanted to avoid having to foil each rainbow stripe separately, hence two stencils with three arcs on each. My go-to app for vector work on the Mac is Affinity Designer; I’m still learning how it works, but I can usually get it to do something close to what I had visualised.

The Minc mist is a fairly dense liquid and I suspect that the only reason I was able to get a relatively fine mist from it on my test piece was because the mini mister I used wasn’t completely dry when I transferred a bit of the mist into it – more experimenting is required. So when I sprayed through the stencil onto my black card, it did end up a bit blobby; not quite the effect I was going for, but still usable. I took an embossing tool and used the ball end to pick up some puddled mist and fill in a few gaps with some extra dots.

I let the mist dry, which takes a little while, carefully arranged some foil strips over it and ran it through the Minc machine. Once it had cooled down I repeated the process with the other stencil and foil colours.

The sentiment strips were heat embossed on vellum, wrapped around the background panels and fixed in place with double-sided tape on the back. This avoids the need to add adhesive behind the vellum on the front where it would be visible (this is a particular problem when adhering vellum over black card).

CR00269 60s mod Mae

CR00268 Super Mae

Super Mae and Mod Mae were printed at the same size onto Neenah solar white and coloured with Copic markers using the same colour palette for each. Once I’d fussy cut them out, I drew around them onto some foam sheet and cut inside the lines, creating a supportive foam shape for dimension. These cards would be going in the post, so a few foam squares wouldn’t be enough to ensure they arrived in good condition.

And that’s the cards finished. No sequins or Wink of Stella — the foil provides more than enough shine and the black background gives great contrast. I love the challenge of creating complementary cards for the twins and I’m really happy with how these turned out.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  My Favourite Things – spotlight sentiments
• digital stamps:
  Some Odd Girl – super Mae
  Some Odd Girl – 60s mod Mae
• inks:
  Versamark
• Copic markers – super Mae:
  skin – E00, E50, E21, E11, E04
  hair – E33, E25, E59, E49
  eyes – B02, B04, B06
  body & mask – R32, R35, R37, R56, R59
  cape – R20, R32, R14
  boots etc – BG07, BG18, BG57
• Copic markers – 60s mod Mae:
  skin – E00, E50, E21, E11, E04
  hair – E59, E39, YR24, YR27
  eyes – B02, B04, B06
  dress – R35, R37, R56, R59 / R20, R32, R14
  boots & accessories – BG57, BG07, BG78
• embossing powder:
  Wow! – regular – silver pearl
• foil:
  Wow! – fab foil – red
  Wow! – fab foil – copper
  Wow! – fab foil – gold
  Deco Foil – lime
  Deco Foil – purple
  Heidi Swapp – teal
• paper and card:
  Papermill Direct – plain – black
  Neenah – solar white – 216gsm
  Dovecraft – premium vellum
• miscellaneous:
  Heidi Swap – Minc mist