Hello crafty friends.

I have a poppy card to share with you today. As part of the Paper Rose Studio design team, I have certain dates that I make cards for. And November 11 is one of those days this month. I really wanted to mark the occasion of Remembrance Day, so I chose poppies for my card. The stamp I used is called Modern Poppies.

This card has a YouTube video. I’ve chosen a slightly different, more meditative format than usual for this video – lots of colouring and lots of lovely music from my son Darcy. You can see the video below

For those who would rather have information with words and pictures, read on! I stamped the image from the Modern Poppies stamp set from Paper Rose Studio with Ink on 3 Fadeout ink. This ink gives a faint line that blends into the paint as you add it, giving the illusion that the image has no lines.

The watercolours that I used were a set of Windsor and Newton Cotman half pans that I bought on a recent shopping trip to Tokyo. If you’re interested in that video, you can see it here. (It’s a mix of paper and wool shopping and a little unpack back at my Tokyo apartment.) For each petal on this card, I added some strong thick colour at the centre of the flower, then slowly blended that out to a pale edge of the petal in several stages, washing my brush between each stage, to help the paint to fade. I worked on petals that didn’t touch one another, and only came back to the petals in between once the first set of petals was dry.

I used a similar technique for the leaves and stems, mixing a colour to match what I saw on the online images of poppies, and adding tine little dots to replicate the hairs on the leaves once the basic painting was done. I spattered the page with the red, the green and also white gouache mixed with a little water.

The sentiment comes from a stamp called Big Present Stack. I stamped this in Versamark clear ink, and heat embossed it with white embossing powder.

When using darker coloured card bases, I always put a white insert inside. I give a lot of my cards away as gifts.

Donna.