Hello crafty friends. It’s Donna here, still in Tokyo, but we’re starting to pack the ‘edges’ of our belongings, ready for a stint back in Australia. It’s amazing how after only three years, we have bags of stuff to get rid of. We’ll be traveling back with just suitcases, so the cull will be brutal!

Milly’s Bouquet is definitely not going to be culled! She’s coming with me. This is one of my all time favourite bouquet stamps, and I’ve coloured it so many times, in so many ways. I have coloured it identically twin, then used opposites for the backgrounds. I’m not an expert colourist (colourer?) by any means, but I’ve made a video with a few tips and tricks I’ve learnt along the way to help the focal image pop when colouring. You can see it below.

This card was made by first stamping the images from Milly’s Bouquet from Paper Rose in Memento Tuxedo Black ink, which is Copic friendly.(ie. it won’t smudge all over my paper when I colour over it with alcohol markers) I chose a palette of blue brown and peach for today’s images.

I chose the biggest three flowers to be my focal point for the image, so I put most of my time and effort into shading those. I used B91, 93, 95 and 97 for these flowers. The front flower has more of the lighter tones and the back two use the darker shades more. I used a flicking technique for this flowers, layering flicks over each other without blending. You can see the action in the video if you’d like more information.

I decided to let the pink flowers play a more supporting role. I did this by choosing a lighter colour, and by using less detail in the shading. In fact, I coloured them as one blob with the lighter colour, and then added shadows to the middle of each flower, and the shade parts with the second (still light) colour, and that was it. The leaves, coloured in mushroom browns, (Copics E70,71, 74 and 77) had a little more shading , but not as much as the blue flowers, and the small the leaf, the less attention it got. This way the different parts of the stamp aren’t clamoring for attention.

I mounted the cards very simply, using a peachy pink/beige paper from a stationery shop here in Japan (I remember the days of going shopping…), and some Soft Navy cardstock from Simon Says Stamp.

I cut the front panel using the Stitched Rectangles USA die from Paper Rose. I then spattered these panels with white Gouache (and in the case of the peach panel, some blue watercolour paint too)

The sentiments come from two different Paper Rose sentiment packs. “Have the best day” is from the Big Black and White Sentiments, and “You make me smile” is from Black and White Sentiment Sheets. These Sentiment packs are used so much that they are just a bag of strips these days, and finding a sentiment is more about rummaging than cutting!

I hope that you have enjoyed these cards, as I certainly enjoyed making them. Until next time, stay safe, my friends.

Blessings

Donna