Blue Poppies

 Good morning! How are we mid way through August already - This year is passing way too quickly.

I'm back today with some inspiration for Maker Forte. I have a floral card to show you using Plant Dreams Stamp Set as my main focus. Floral stamps are my favorite to color and to give too!

My design starts with the poppy image from the stamp set. As I am using Copics as my main coloring medium Eclipse Black Ink is perfect. This is a great ink for alcohol markers as it doesn't bleed.

As I said previously, I colored the images with Copic markers. I wanted to achieve more depth with the flowers so I used colored pencils over the top of my marker coloring.

I fussy cut the flowers so they were ready to go on my background. fussy cutting isn't something I do a lot of it, can be tedious, but wanted the flowers to stand out on my background.

On to my background, for this I am using In To The Unknown Stamp Set. I love the swirl of the pattern however it was a little too much detail for my card. A second impression mutes the image making it perfect. I Used Vegas Strip Ink and stamped the image on some scrap cardstock. Without inking the stamp again I then stamped onto Ultra White Cardstock.

As you can see on the scrap cardstock I stamped it twice on there. This was because I hadn't prepped my stamp and the first impression wasn't crisp. Prime Time Stamp Conditioner Is great for this, spray the stamp lightly and leave for 60 seconds. The stamp will stamp perfectly after this.

Next I wanted a sentiment stamping directly on to the background. Again I used Eclipse Black Ink for this. I misread the sentiment and part of it should be spring (also in the stamp set) but that was too big for my design so I will show you how I fix it lower down.

Building my card was simple. I used a Side Fold A2 Card Base and matted this with a dark blue cardstock. My stamped background covered this. The card needed some dimension so I added foam to my poppies giving them lift from the card.

This point is when I realize my sentiment doesn't make sense. To fix this I trimmed the word 'flowers' from another stamp in the set and added it above the one already stamped.

This is the advantage of a stamp set having a number of sentiments to choose from.

You can see the depth I achieved by adding colored pencil over my marker coloring.

Thank you for taking time to read my post and if you use it for inspiration I would love to see your card!