Essence of Nature (by Julie)

Hello, today my cards come to you courtesy of Essence of Nature and Honey Bee stamp sets.

For my first card I have used water colour card and started by making a wash of blues, purples, yellows and oranges to form my background. When dry I stamped the stylised tree branches around the edges of the card, using grey Versafine and darkened with Hickory Smoke Distress ink. To the right hand side of the card I have stamped the naked tree twice, using Sepia Versafine.

I stamped the naked tree scene onto spare water colour card with clear embossing ink, before applying copper embossing powder and then heating with a heat gun. The embossing acts as a resist so it is easy to go over the image with a water colour wash to match the base card.

I added grey coloured pencil shading to ground the trees on the base card, white paint pen highlights to the border around the card and finished off with a sentiment from Birthday Words.

For my second card I stamped the flowers from Honey Bee twice in the centre of the card blank and twice onto copy paper so that they could be cut out and placed on the design to act as a mask. Once the flowers are covered you can stamp the honey comb back ground. I found in one spot I had not inked up the background correctly so that left a perfect gap to stamp a spare honey bee that you may be able to spy to the left of the design...ha ha!

Remove the flower masks and colour with coloured pencils and apply Mahogany Distress ink to the background. 

The design was finished of with white paint pen dots and highlights and a sentiment from Birthday Words.

Thank you for stopping by and please call back for daily Design Team inspiration.

Julie xx