This week Honey Bee Stamps is celebrating “Green Week“! I am really loving their products lately and especially their “Lovely Layers” collection of these beautiful floral dies. I already have the “Hydrangeous”, “Anemone”, “Greenery” and “Autumn Leaves“. AND…I just ordered yesterday the “Tulips” and “Easter Lily” dies!
You can do so much with die cuts than die cutting them with colored cardstock. Nothing wrong with that cause you can spruce up that too. Lately, I’ve wanted to use my watercolor markers or other color mediums and so for my 3 cards today, I went with green Alcohol inks: (“Mojito“, “Everglades“, “Laguna“, and “Moss“).
I also mixed it with “Pitch Black” and “Gilded” alloy and the gold with the black mixed with all the greens just produced this dynamic effect. I LOVED the outcome! One other little tool I used, that I had not before, was a dry paintbrush. On one card, you’ll see how dramatic it turned out! I saw my friend, “Joy” with “Create it with Joy” use hers to make streaks across the paper and I loved that so had to try it!
When I use alcohol inks, I love to spray my Yupo paper with 99% Isopropyl alcohol and then use the Blending solution to move the inks around the paper.
For my card below, I just laid down all my colors and the alloy and with the paint brush, brushed down the paper in a diagonal motion. No blending solution and no air blower. I just love how it looks!
For the rest of my cards, I just added drops of all the colors and kept using my air blower until I liked the final results.
Alcohol Inking is so much fun and so addictive, I have to force myself to stop playing!
After I finished playing with my alcohol inks, I laid all 3 pieces aside to dry while I die cut my leaves from Honey Bee Stamps’ “Greenery” set on white cardstock. I colored some with Copic markers and left some white.
Copic colors I used are my go-to for greens: YG67 (darkest), YG17 (mid-tone) and YG03 (lightest).
I added a few details on those leaves with my #10 white gelly roll pen. Time to make the sentiments so I chose Honey Bee Stamp’s “Blessed” stamp/die. I die cut the shadow with Simon Says Stamp dark green cardstock, it’s almost black but it’s definitely green! The letters, I die cut with gold metallic papers.
The secondary sentiment I stamped on white cardstock and die cut that with Simon’s sentiment strips die set and few more to stack them up for a little dimension.
I placed everything on the card panel with “Bearly Art Glue“. I didn’t want to add any extra embellishments because I wanted the backgrounds to shine.
- Honey Bee Stamps “Greenery” Lovely Layers Dies Set here or here
- Honey Bee Stamps “Blessed” stamp set/coordinating die here or here
- Tim Holtz Alcohol Inks Bundle – Etsy ~ AZ (this is the set I own)
- Ranger Blending Solution
- 99% Isopropyl Alcohol (bought my from my local Fred Meyer’s store, but you can use 91% – 99%); AZ has a bundle of six 91% Isopropyl Alcohol here
- Ranger Alcohol Air blower
- Ranger Alloys bundle or get them separately here
- Ranger Yupo Paper
- 5/8 Artist’s Loft Paintbrush (comes in a set of 10)
- Copic Sketch Markers here, here or here
- Bearly Art Liquid Glue
- Simon Says Stamp “Midnight Green” Cardstock
- Simon Says Stamp gold metallic paper
- Accents Opaque 100 lb. White Cardstock
- White #10 Gelly Roll Pen
