Hello everyone. I’ve got my act together and managed to get the stamp from July’s Clarity Craft Club out of it’s packaging and into action before the end of the month! This is such a lovely floral spray I just couldn’t resist it, and one of the new Landscape Colour Wash printed toppers made the perfect background.

I spent a happy few minutes choosing one of the toppers – these are just beautiful and originated from the backgrounds Barbara in preparation for the workshop she led at the end of the June Open Days (we had a great day creating watercolour backgrounds on the Handmade Artisan paper) The printing on these toppers also picks up the effect of the textured paper, although they are completely smooth. Anyway, having finally settled on one, I stamped the floral spray and sentiment onto it with black Archival ink.

Before adding colour to the flowers and leaves, I first lifted the topper’s colours from each of them with an ink eraser pencil. That meant I could get truer tones when then shading with my Polychromo pencils, without the background tones distorting them.

Finally. I covered a 5×7 card blank with a piece of Amazonia companion paper and simply attached the topper onto it. I wanted to highlight the floral spray a little more, so grabbed my ultra fine white Posca pen and added a few dots around the flowers and leaves.

This was so quick and easy (once I’d chosen the background topper!), but I think it’s so effective with just a little colour on the flowers, reflecting the background tones. I’m going to share this with a few challenges as well, starting with Atlantic Hearts having taken a slightly loose interpretation of their sketch, which I flipped to the mirror image. My flowers also fit the themes at CAS on Friday, Triple B and Beautiful Blossoms.