Hello my crafty friends. I always imagine you as I write, reading this in bed, or at your craft desk, or on your couch. Do you read anywhere else? I like reading on trains.

I have lots of exciting new to share today, the first of which is that I’ve started a YouTube channel! I’ve wanted to do this for so long, but the quietness gifted to me by isolation has been my opportunity. I’ll put the link to the YouTube video at the bottom of this post.

Today I have a set of 6 cards that all use the Lotus Bouquet stamp set from Paper Rose. I love the openness of this design – just right for colouring, with all kinds of media, which is exactly what I’ve done. I originally planned for four cards, but a mistake and a late realization stretched the set to six.

Here are the cards!

For this first card, I stamped in Memento Tuxedo Black Ink which is alcohol marker friendly, and colored with my Copic markers. The colours I used are RV09, RV55, RV52, BG75, BG72, BG70, YG17, YG25, YG23, YG01, BV23.

For this second card, I used the same black ink as before, but this time, I blended all around the outside of the Lotus using Distress Inks in Speckled Egg and Bundled Sage. I made a mask using some post it tape. Because this image has ‘middles’, I cut the mask into several pieces and pressed each down before blending.

Here’s where we come to my mistake. I grabbed the wrong piece of paper for my white heat embossed card which is to follow a little further down, and used regular card instead of watercolour card. Since I couldn’t watercolour, I decided to ink blend the card the same as the one above. This worked fine, but you couldn’t really see the details of the lotus blooms, so I grabbed some colored pencils and filled in just a hint of colour to make the image ‘appear’. The sentiment below, and all of the black background sentiments used today come from a set called Black and White Sentiment Strips from Paper Rose.

Ok, here’s what I meant to do! I stamped this image in Versamark ink and heat embossed using Hero Arts White Embossing Powder. NOW I have the correct watercolour paper, so I could set about making my original idea, which was to colour the image with watercolours. I used Distress Inks this time, in Speckled egg, Picked Raspberry, Twisted Citron and Stormy Sky.

Next, I made two cards using Yupo paper and Alcohol inks. First I made a panel, then used the stamp and Copic blending solution to lift ink off ONE PIECE of paper, and lay it onto another. Alcohol lift ink would be perfect for this, but as yet, I don’t own any, so I had to make my own stamp pad. My sentiment for this card is a wrap around vellum piece, which has been stamped in Versamark ink and heat embossed using Hero Arts White Embossing Powder. This sentiment is also from the Lotus Bouquet stamp set.

When trimming down the brighter piece of Yupo, I saved two strips to use as borders on the second Yupo card. I like the pop of colour they give to an otherwise shy and retiring card.

You can see all of these card on my shiny new Youtube channel. If you are wondering how I did something, you’ll now be able so see it for yourself.

I hope you enjoyed this set of 6 cards, and that you are staying safe and well. If you are interested in seeing more cards, feel free to visit my Instagram feed here.

Until next time, may your days be full of flowers.

Blessings,

Donna