Wedded Bliss – SSS Blissful Card Kit

I feel like I have wedding on the brain at the moment! I spent a large chunk of yesterday working on some thank you cards that will be a wedding present. I made a wedding card today, and have plans for another one tomorrow. And a week today I’ll be in England in readiness for a wedding that weekend. I suppose it is wedding season, so we can put it down to that. I think four or five of my Facebook friends (people I went to school with) have got married this past fortnight, and at least that many more weddings have appeared on my feed from friends-of-friends’ weddings. It was making me think about how everyone is getting married and I’m barely managing to adult, but then I remembered I’m already married and have been for about four years, so I can’t really complain..! 😉

Okay enough of that silliness, on with the card!

I started by stamping the large floral stamp from the Floral Bliss stamp set onto a piece of watercolour paper using Barely Beige ink. The stamp set and ink both came from Simon Says Stamp’s June Card Kit, Blissful. The Barely Beige ink is great for no-line watercolouring. Actually because of the nature of this ink some people call the technique faux no-line watercolouring. The ink picks up the colour that is painted over it, creating a darker shade of the colour used for the painting. It’s a very pretty effect!

After stamping out the flower image along with a coordinating sentiment from the stamp set I began painting. I mixed up a coral colour for the roses (I presume that’s what they are… let’s just go with that, and I’ll call the other flowers whatever I think they might be too…) working in several layers in order to try and give some dimension and shape to the flowers. Once I was finished painting the flowers I used the same colour to paint the berries/buds, concentrating the colour on the left hand side to give a rounded appearance. Once I was finished with the coral colour I added a little green to what was left of it. This dulled the colour down and gave me a slightly different tone to use for the centres of the roses.

Next I mixed up some blue. I was going for an aqua tone but with a somewhat limited colour palette did not get quite the tone I wanted. I used the blue to colour the large daisies and the little forget-me-nots. Again when I was finished with the painting I toned down what was left of the colour, this time with a little orange, to paint the centres.

The last areas to paint were the stems of the berries and all the leaves. The last colour in the colour scheme I had chosen was grey. Leaves are, of course, normally green. So I compromised. I painted the stems grey, then mixed together some more of the aqua colour with a little more green and then some black. I thinned it out a lot with water until I was left with a blue-green-grey colour which I used to paint all the leaves.

Once the painting was all finished and completely dry the outside of the card was complete. I restamped the sentiment to darken it up a little, then adhered the watercolour panel flush to a card base. This is a one layer card which is why I adhered it flush – the card base is not visible from the front – but I decided to use a coloured card base rather than one from watercolour paper because it would stabilise any warping from the painting.

As a final touch I decorated the inside. I restamped the flowers in the same Barely Beige ink onto the inside of the card, giving a tone on tone look. I then took one of the other sentiments from the stamp set and stamped that over the top of the flowers with the same ink. As the ink is the same colour for both the flowers and the sentiment I had to restamp the word a few times, darkening it up enough to ensure legibility.

I really like how this card ended up. The colour scheme is a bit unusual for a floral card, what with the lack of green, but I feel the grey shades on the leaves actually help the flowers stand out more. I did have trouble with the shading on the daisies, and they seem rather flat as a result. Definitely something I need to practice with. The roses turned out pretty well though! That said, I probably wasn’t certain enough of my light source because looking at the card now it seems as if the lighting direction is not consistent from element to element. Another thing to work on. But that’s fine – part of the fun is in learning from mistakes, right?

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

Addicted to Stamps and More – Make Your Mark

Allsorts Challenge – Flower Power

CASual Fridays – Colour Challenge: Coral, Aqua, Grey (edit – where it was picked as a favourite!)

Double D Challenges – Anything Wedding

Moving Along With The Times – English Country Garden

Time Out Challenges – Celebrations and Optional: One Layer (edit – where it received honours!)