In an English Country Garden by Brenda

Good morning, it's my turn to share some more inspiration using the beautiful cottage garden flowers which featured in some of Lesley's recent Hochanda shows.

I adore Digitalis so the Honey Bee stamps set used on the above card really appealed to me, well all flowers do but anything associated with a traditional cottage garden reminds me of my childhood which is now reflected in my own gardens.

I started by stamping the Digitalis twice onto a piece of card, then cut around part of the blooms so that I could use a die to cut a square aperture.........by doing this you can carefully place the cut section outside the die so that they then lay over the aperture.

Next I have a 6"x8" canvas, it was a pre primed canvas but I gave it another coat of gesso  before building up the colour with acrylic paints and then added some texture with a stencil and texture paste coloured with the same yellow acrylic paint. I did the same with the tiny blue dots and then stamped around the edges with the honeycomb stamp from the Honey Bee stamp sheet. The digitalis were coloured with the same paints but watered down and the each cut out to place onto the canvas. The sentiments are from Amazing Macintosh Words.

The base of this card is brown and gold metallic acrylic paint brushed in both directions across the card and water added to give a ramdom look, he the honeycombe from Honey Bee stamped around the edges with Versafine Toffee. I stamped, coloured and cut out six of the Sunflowers from the same set, layered them up and added a sentiment from Words to Dazzle and Sparkle.

For my final card I usea a piece of black card for the base layer, a stencil and sprayed mica which was simply gold mica powder and water mixed together. The flowers from Fragrant Honeysuckle and Bee were stamped with Versamark and heat embossed with detail white powder then coloured in with sparkle pens.

As always I really appreciate your visits and kind words.