Translucent flowers

This card had me reaching back in time to — checks spreadsheet — the ninth card I ever made, way back in 2014, nearly ten (!!!) years ago. Specifically for the piece of black crumpled faux leather paper I used as the base for these translucent flowers, which has been sitting in my stash all that time.

I normally have a good idea of where the idea for a card design comes from, but I don’t think there was any specific prompt for this one; I just needed to make a birthday card, wanted to do something floral and, as usual, try something new in the process.

It’s rare that I actually work directly on the final card base, nearly everything gets made separately and then mounted on a base at the end, but this didn’t feel like it would work as well as a panel so direct-to-card it was.

Because I was using the textured leather paper, I couldn’t really stamp the flowers and leaves onto the card. Instead, I stamped them onto masking paper and fussy cut them out. This meant I could play around with the arrangement until I was happy with how they fit over the deliberately wonky black panel.

Once I’d finalised the layout, I took a photo for reference and started transferring the design onto the card. I did this by sticking down each masking paper element in turn and drawing around it with a white gel pen. When all the outlines were done, I went back and filled in the details freehand.

Then I had to figure out how to add colour. The solution came through sheer laziness. Rather than search through my supplies to see what caught my eye, I simply looked around the desk to see what was near at hand that would do the job. And that’s when I noticed a handful of Lumocolor pencils that probably came in a Scrawlrbox one month, sitting on the side having never been used. Well, they’ve been used now and I really like the translucent effect over both the black paper and the lavender card base.

Then it just needed a little bling to finish it off, so I got out my trusty Pebeo relief gilding paste and shiny gilding sheet and added a border around the edge and lots of dots in the middle of the flowers.

As usual, no feedback from this particular person, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Create a Smile – time to say thanks
  Create a Smile – in bloom
• colour:
  Staedtler Lumocolor permanent pencils
• pens:
  Uni-ball Signo UM-153 white
• miscellaneous:
  Pebeo Mixtion Relief Gilding Paste
  gold gilding sheet