The idea for this page just hit me the other day. I was thinking about all those wonderfuly beautiful flowers in the Year of Flowers set by Melanie Muenchinger. I can't get enough oif it when it comes to creating scrapbook pages. I was thinking they would look great all together in a big bouquet or a flower garden, and so that's what I set out to do. It was a little bit time consuming, but SO worth it in the end.
I stamped all the flowers on colored cardstock so that took away a lot of the coloring work. By stamping on colored cardstock, the flowers have a much more vivid and bright look to them. I stamped with Versamark ink and them embossed them using black embossing powder. I didn't really use black embossing powder until a few months ago. Once I started using it, I couldn't believe I'd gone so long without trying it out. It works great for watercoloring but it's also great for bold and vivid embossed images like these flowers when stamped on colored cardstock.
I cut all of the flowers and leaves out using my Paper Snips (precision tip scissors work the best for a job like this). For the shading, I used my Copic markers. I was able to find markers in my 2 boxes of Copics that matched the SU cardstock colors really well. I used colors that were just a tad darker than the cardstock so that it didn't overwhelm them but just give a little bit of dimension.
My cardstock base for this page is a piece of textured Bazzill Basics cardstock (12x12) that I swiped around the edges with a Mellow Moss craft pad. I used a piece of ribbon I found at Michael's across the bottom of the page, as well as across two of the corners of my photo. HINT: I didn't fold the ribbon around the photo....I simply adhered it to the corners of the photo and then trimmed along the edge.
I first laid out the flowers in a layout that I liked and left them like that (I didn't include the leaves in my layout.) I left them there as I picked each one up and adhered it to the page, moving some of them slightly out of the way so that I had some room to work, but also so that I wouldn't mess up the layout that I'd created. I mounted some of the flowers on the layout with pop-dots so that it gave my flower garden some dimension. Then, I tucked the leaves in where I thought they looked best.
The Year of Flowers set has a couple of stem images in it, but I just hand cut the small stems that I needed and used a marker to draw the black lines on them.
The quote is one that I found on one of my favorite quote sites: Quote Garden. I penciled the words in first and then went over them with my Slick Writer marker and then erased the pencil lines.
The photo is one that my friend, Jen, took while she was here last May. I've been wanting to do something with this photo for a while and now that I've completed this page, I think I might just find a frame for it and hang it on my wall instead of putting it in my scrapbook. It would look great on my studio wall!
Happy Creating!
-Stampin' Mama
