Hello everyone. I’ve got a beautiful garden of flowers to share with you today, using another of the new Floral Wall Mixed Impressions stamps, this time the A6 sized outline image from the bottom of the left hand sheet. I’ve basically just stamped it onto designer paper and coloured it in, adding one of the I Am Essential – Birthday sentiments! That may sound simple (and it essentially is…), but this one didn’t make it onto last week’s launch show for these stamps – we were on a pretty tight turnaround time to get our samples back to Clarity and I couldn’t get it finished in time to make the post with my other designs. So, I managed to find some time with my Polychromos this weekend and here it is now.

I found a piece of the Waimea Falls designer paper that was fairly muted, then stamped the Floral Wall image straight onto it with black Archival ink.

I then set about colouring the wonderful profusion of flowers and leaves with my Polychromo pencils – it took me a little while (this is not one for a quick card!) but was so satisfying! Colouring the image takes you right into all the details that Barbara drew into this design, but you can no doubt see why I didn’t manage to get it off to the post in time for last week’s shows! Anyway, having shaded finally finished my shading, I drew a deckled edge around the image with a micron pen to frame it.

Colouring done, I edged the topper with a black Sharpie (I always use a ruler when I’m doing this on paper, as there’s more danger of the pen slipping onto my masterpiece!). One of the great things about Clarity’s papers are that the plain companion ones pick up the tones from the matching designer sets, so I was able to fin the perfect backing piece for my card front in the Waimea Falls set – having attached it to the 6×6 card using Pritt stick, I mounted the topper on some scrap card for a little dimension, glues that into place and added one of the birthday sentiments. The finally touch was to use an ultra fine white Posca pen to add little highlights to the flowers and dots.

It may have taken a bit of work, but I’m so pleased with how this turned out – definitely a good one to make for special birthdays!

I’m going to share this with Inkspirational for their ‘floral palette’ theme, with 613 Avenue Create for their ‘May flowers’ option, and with Triple B (this certainly picks up their ‘blooms’ option!)