Painting backwards....

Hello, hello!  Norine here from The Velvet Lemon blog.  It's been a week for introductions hasn't it, but let me just say how delighted I am to have been invited to join such a talented group of paper crafters, and to contribute here at Butterfly Reflections Ink!  

Today I'm sharing with you, some cards I made by working backwards. 

What do I mean, you wonder?  Well, it's a technique I sometimes enjoy doing, where you "smoosh" your water based ink pads on a craft mat, mist the colors with water and then drag your water color paper through it to create a pretty mess of color.    

For today's cards, I wanted a blend of blues and greens (always a crowd pleaser) and yellows/pinks.  You will always be happier with the results when you keep the green/blues from overlapping with the yellow/pinks, because that just produces an unappealing mud color.  

I used a variety of Tim Holtz Distress Inks for this project, but any water based inks will work the same.  It's a process of layering color that takes awhile, because you want to let each layer dry before doing more smooshing to add another layer of color.  It's good to start with at least a vague idea of what stamps you plan to use, and florals work best I've found, although fruits are lovely too. 

The next step is to lay your stamps out over the corresponding colors, and using Post-It paper masks to create bouquets and boughs and floral clusters of any kind.  

Because I had 4 colored card panels, I had that many different options to try for embossing looks.  I ended up heat embossing with gold, silver and black.  The metallic looks are quite pretty as they catch the light, but the black stamped outlined cards really turned out to be my overall favorite. 

I used the Pretty Peony and Botanicals stamp sets from The Stamp Market for the florals and leaves...

and I used sentiments from the Just Saying Hello and Happy Days sets from Create A Smile.  Two of the cards had their sentiment stamped directly on the card front, one has a vellum band stamped and wrapped around the edges and the last has the sentiment stamped on a piece of black cardstock and foam mounted for extra dimension.

After all the effort of creating the color and then stamping the images, I felt that I wanted to keep the cards quite simple after that, so I just added a few little little dots of Nuvo Drops and called it good.   

Thanks for stopping by today!  Have a most wonderful day!