Hello - Ink Blended Flower

This week at Just Us Girls Challenge #624 it is Color Week, and we are using ivory, soft rose and sage green. I was worried that I wouldn't have card stock in those colors, so I got out some inks and blended away! I am also playing along with The Flower Challenge #66 because I used my last scrap of a nice textured watercolor paper (saved/hoarded for a long time) for the flower.

I knew I wanted to pop up the flower (Stampin' Up! Blended Bloom) and leaves (Magenta) instead of leaving them flat, so I started by making two flowers on my last piece of a favorite watercolor paper (thinking I would be watercoloring and because of its thickness) and three leaves on regular white card stock. I heat embossed the leaves with Versamark ink and white embossing powder, and for the flowers I ended up just stamping with Stampin' Up! Going Gray Classic ink. I decided to ink blend both flowers with distress oxide inks because my practice piece of watercoloring just wasn't pleasing me. For the center of the front flower I used Prismacolor pencil for the pink stamens and a tiny ink blending brush for the green.  On the second flower I just ink blended with pink and a little bit of green ink. I cut away the outer petals of the front flower so that the second one would show from behind, then bent the edges up like real petals. I added some sequins in the center of the front flower, then glued the two flower sections together. Next, I arranged my leaves and glued them behind the flower. After gluing the flower to the card front I popped up the leaves with foam tape and bent the ends up a little. I had a Hello die cut that was black, but ink blended white over it to make it gray like the ink in the flower. I cut a thin strip of green card stock for the card front and after attaching it to the ivory mini slimline card base, I added the sentiment on the right side.

We hope you will join us this week for our Just Us Girls Color Challenge! Check out all the inspiration from the Design Team!

-Carol