In bloom

I was in the mood for two things: using my Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers — hereafter known as ziggies for the sake of brevity — and doing a bit of heat embossing. After a couple of busy days creating the mouse at the lake card, I had thought that I would keep that day’s colouring for the Daily Marker challenge simple; that plan didn’t last long.

You see, I also wanted to use my new floral stamps. And colouring flowers leads to masking, which means fussy cutting. Followed by multiple stages of heat embossing.

Then there’s the colouring, which was straightforward and relaxing. At least until I realised that I had forgotten how wet ziggies are and cursed at the smudges on the previously nice white bit of the card. More fussy cutting would be required.

Somewhere along the way, I thought it would be a good idea to outline the flowers. Unfortunately, that just meant that the pretty gold embossing started to disappear into the background and fussy cutting it out didn’t improve the situation.

At this point, I took a photo of it for Instagram, just in case I made an awful mess in the process of trying to fix it 🙂

I decided to try outlining along the edge of the embossing in black. I started drawing and almost immediately my pen slipped away from the embossing line, not by much, but enough that I could no longer get away with a simple line. This actually turned out to be a good thing. Rather than just draw a thicker black line, I varied the line width as I went and I really like the effect.

Rather than try to mount it on a square card base (and then have to figure out what to do with the empty space), I created a top-folding strip that was narrow enough to hide behind the flowers but still wide enough to write a message on.

Challenges:

• The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Create A Smile – in bloom
• inks:
  Versamark
• pens:
  EK Tools elegant calligraphy pen
• Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers:
  outline – 098 pale dawn gray
  leaves – 045 pale green, 047 may green
  light blue flowers – 302 haze blue, 036 light blue, 042 turquoise green
  mid blue flowers – 031 cobalt blue, 037 cornflower blue, 045 pale green
  purple flower – 081 light violet, 080 violet, 033 persian green, 042 turquoise green
• embossing powder:
  Wow! – gold rich pale
• paper and card:
  Strathmore Bristol smooth
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable cotton white

The colouring was done on 15th September 2017 as part of The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge