Hello crafty friends and welcome to our latest challenge at CAS Colours & Sketches, where we’ve got a new layout for you to play with. I decided to have another play with the Build a Bloom stamps, inspired by the brilliant free Craftalong that Barbara Gray ran last Thursday evening – it pushed me out of my comfort zone with the scribbling and doodling, but was great fun! I thoroughly recommend watching the session (the link is above) and playing along.

Anyway, I decided to have another go at it, using the CAS C&S layout as my basis. I took a 3.5″ square of premium card, inked up the taller background petal with ‘carved pumpkin’ Distress Oxide, stamped it off twice on copy paper and used the ‘third generation’ for on my card. I took the middle petal of the ones on the left, again inked with the ‘carved pumpkin’ but this time just stamped off once before adding it to my card – I did this a second time too, so that the petals could fan out either side of the first one. I then took the smaller shaped one and this time didn’t stamp the ink off before adding it to the card – it’s a great way to get the different shades of the same tone.

I switched to black Archival ink and stamped in the stem, scribbly leaves and dots along the ground.

Next was to add a scribbly outline to the flower, using a micron pen, then shade the leaves with a green Polychromo pencil

I then went back in with my micron pen, adding dots and doodles to the flower, together with some highlights using a white Posca pen. I stamped one of the Tall Art Deco sentiments and one of the bees from the Just Butterflies & Bees set, then doodled a frame around the whole image.

It took a bit of thinking to come up with a way to pick up the diagonal element of the sketch! I solved it with the scribbled leaves stamps – I drew a pencil guideline across a 5×5 card blank, then stamped the leaves twice at each end, shading them in with Polychromos.

I then simply attached the topper to the card blank.

With hindsight, I could probably have left the card without the doodled frame, but we’re all perfect after the event, aren’t we?! This layout has got so many possibilities – do check out the inspiration from the rest of the design team and we hope you’ll come and play along with us.

I’m sharing this card with a couple of other challenges, Festive Friday and Cardz4Galz, both focused on bees (and you know I do love a bee on a card, so don’t need much of an excuse!)