Autumn Leaves with Beautiful Day

I'm pretty sure it's no secret that I love ink blended backgrounds, especially those that have been misted with some kind of shimmer spray like a solution of Perfect Pearls or Tsukineko Sheer Shimmer Spritz.  It just makes for the nicest, most well blended backgrounds.  I've watched several Periscopes during the last few days while CHA has been going on and I'm pretty sure I heard Tim Holtz say that they were not going to be making Perfect Pearls Mist anymore. I think I heard that they have a mica pigment product now.  We'll see what happens as stock is depleted in our favorite stores.  I make my own mist from the Perfect Pearls Pigment Powder anyhow but I hope to be able to continue to purchase that item.

I started this card with a 4.25 x 5.5 inch piece of watercolor paper.  Using my Ranger Mini Ink Blending Tool, I applied Lost Lagoon and Garden Green Ink and then spritzed it with water and let the inks blend and merge.  On two other pieces of watercolor paper I inked up the paper directly with the Garden Green and Wild Wasabi Inks with a very high saturation of color and lightly misted with water.  I guess you can say that I swiped the ink pad across the paper to get such intense deposits of color.  I could have just used green paper, but I don't have the right shade and the spritzing gives it that mottled look. Actually, the look is more like dappling, but I think that is always associated with horses and other animals, so I call this mottled.  I used to photograph a beautiful horse that had the most gorgeous dappling on his back.

Next, I stamped 6 of the outline images from the WPLUS9 Autumn Leaves Stamp Set and heat set them using WOW! Rich Pale Gold Embossing Powder. The color of this embossing powder is more brass than gold and I think it would be well suited for masculine cards because it isn't nearly as shiny as regular gold embossing.  I used the Autumn Leaves Coordinating Dies to cut the leaves. I stamped the peony bloom outline from the Altenew Beautiful Day Stamp Set. That stamp set is a layering stamp set and I tried it out that way today but I wasn't satisfied with the inks I have to choose from and in the end I decided to watercolor the image.

Because I wanted a variety of shades of green leaves, I stamped the solid leaf image from Autumn Leaves directly on to my background panel and then started adhering the die cut leaves on top of that.  You can see that on a couple of those pieces, I didn't get the die lined up very well, but I kind of liked the look it gave so decided to go with it rather than not use them all.  I like leaves - all kinds and all seasons.  Just like snowflakes, no two are the same.  And even though there are a few layers of paper, it's still pretty flat for mailing purposes.

The bloom was watercolored using Spun Sugar Distress Marker.  There are several layers of color because I didn't want to go as dark as Worn Lipstick so I just added color until I felt it was right, but allowed it to dry completely between each layer of color.  Then I fussy cut it although I detest fussy cutting.  There is a foam dot in just the center of the bloom.

I played around with different sets to find a greeting that would fit across in the space I had left using the "Hello"  from a Papertrey Ink Stamp Set called Graceful Greetings.  I love all of the greetings in that set and I'm hoping to get the coordinating dies soon.  You can see that it is a tight fit across that card front but a miss is as good as a mile in this case.  I'd really like to try this style of card again only with blue in the background to mimic a sky but this color combination was inspired by Melissa Phillips from the Papertrey Ink Design Team.

It's time to start thinking about making a few Valentines so you'll see some coming up soon. Thanks for stopping by today and I hope you have a great day.