All About Love Card by Heather Telford

I paired the floral Penny Black stamp, Effulgence with a new sentiment from the Penny Black set All about love. To create my colourful background I used two colors from Ken Oliver’s Color Burst line but you can see I ended up with more than two colors in my panel. That’s the beauty of Ken Oliver’s Color Burst paints.

To begin I stamped ‘effulgence’ in versamark on hot pressed watercolor paper then embossed in gold powder. At this point,  you may as well stamp the word ‘love’ with versamark and emboss it in gold. I hadn’t decided on my sentiment back when I was stamping flowers which is often how I create my cards, it’s always the decorative panel first then I think about a sentiment and where I might put it!

I taped my embossed panel to a firm surface with painter’s tape and then spritzed water over the whole panel. I sprinkled both tangerine and merlot colorburst powders onto the wet panel and watched the colors activate. You can see there are patches of purple, blue and red in amongst the pink and orange, that is because the watercolor powders are not one pure pigment but a mix of several pigments. I kept adding water and powders until I had a nice mix over the panel then used a paintbrush to make sure color spread into all the nooks and crannies.

I had begun with a tall narrow panel of watercolor paper so I decided to make it a feature of the card. I could have framed it on a the common 4.25″ x 5.5″ card base but instead, I decided to mat the panel with gold cardstock and trim the card base down to the size of the panel. I kept the sentiment panel, which I painted with merlot and tangerine to match, 4.25″ wide and popped it up on dimensional tape over the floral panel. The result is an unusual card design which still fits into a basic envelope.

Learn a little about Heather: