Hello crafty friends!
It's month two for me on A Blog Named Hero's design team, and what a talented group of people I'm finding in my co-designers! (It's pretty intimidating, really...but also seems to push me to try new things.)
This month's challenge (and the chance to win a $50 gift certificate from Hero Arts!) may be my one of my favorite themes for cardmaking: Florals.
the first cards I made were all about florals--and flowers are still my very favorite things to color. I love all the color you can use with flowers and those color can be soft or strong, true to life or simply fantastical.
What I did: For today's card I tried a technique that was new to me--I heat embossed the outline of this biiiiig flower (I mean really big--like five inches (13cm) across on an alcohol ink panel. I wondered if I could successfully heat emboss the paper--I had used Yupo, which is basically a plastic paper--without melting it or making the embossing powder bubble. Turns out it worked out just fine. I'll be doing this again, for sure!
I fussy cut the flower and leaves; popped them up on a gel press background using foam squares (look closely and you'll see I the mail jumble peekaboo stamp doing duty as a background)with some spattered gold and green and black inks and paints to give that background some interest; and added one of my favorite sentiment dies that I embossed about 4 times, to get a really rounded standout effect. I matted my panel with black card stock, popped it onto my card base--et voila (as my French design team friend might say), a finished card!
By the way: This is a 5X7 inch (A7) card. I've been making those a lot lately. I think that this large format is a real wow from the time the envelope arrives in your recipient's mailbox. Also, I really love big bold images--and this larger format really helps show off those images. Honestly, it would have broken my heart to cut up that big peony.
Have you tried a 5X7 card? What about heat embossing? Gel press? Alcohol ink? It seems this card--which features each of these--is sort of a demo of all of these techniques (I love to color, too, but a little experimentation is good fun, too!)
Can't wait to see your floral cards--I hope you'll play along with us!
Thanks so much for stopping by,
Essie
That flower is so luminous! Beautiful work! Yes I like big cards too— I feel like I can get a nice image -and- a sentiment on there.
ReplyDeleteSo glad you like my card, Liz! Honestly, I don't know why people don't make more cards of this size -- seems that if we're going to go take the time to make a card, it might as well be big enough to stand out a bit (and besides, cards from Hallmark, etc., are all about this size, aren't they?)
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