Susan - Color Your Day

The idea of using something in nature, pictures, or magazines to inspire the theme, color, or other aspects of a card is great, and I have been meaning to try to reproduce the colors in a photograph that my husband took of this flower:

Isn't it amazing what wonderful, vibrant colors nature puts together!!

I used the large floral image in the Hero Arts/Altenew collaboration that looked a bit like the flower in the photo to begin this project. I used Copic markers to color the petals in various pink and violet pink shades on the tops of the petals and yellows and yellow red colors toward the bottoms and blended in the middle. I masked off the bottom of the flower to add leaves and also made additional leaves to provide more color contrast and dimension.Once the Copic coloring was completed, I added a few veins in the petals with a fine point Sharpie pen in a fuchsia color.

I then fussy cut the flower and trimmed off one side. The "stand alone" leaves are glued to the card panel and the flower and attached leaves are on foam tape, The background panel uses the Classy Stripes stencil with gray (Hickory Smoke) on the right edge, blending in toward the center with blue (Tumbled Glass). The edges of the panel are highlighted with Tumbled Glass to help draw your eye in toward the focal point.

The "hello" sentiment is made from the Fancy Hello die. I used the same inks (Hickory Smoke and Tumbled Glass) to blend on the bottom and top of the word, and then added 4 layers of thick cardstock to the back in the places where it doesn't sit on the floral image:

I think that cutting foam tape to prop up the back of these small images is frustrating, and find that building up the dimension with additional pieces of cardstock both holds up better and (for me, at least) is easier.

After getting all the layers of the "hello" in place, I used thick clear embossing powder on the word. I put down 3 layers of clear, and one layer of iridescent sparkle embossing powder to give this some "glitz."

To finish off the sparkle, I added a few silver colored confetti sequins as well as a few iridescent gems.

I liked using the more neutral and muted colors to contrast with the very bright, vivid floral image and had lots of fun putting this together. Hope you like it, too!