Purple Poppies Birthday Card

I can't seem to stay away from purple!  I love it with greens and blues, purple and white, purple and gray.  All shades of purple....but I'm especially fond of eggplant, and some of the muted shades, with touches of gray and black.....

 

Today's card features Penny Black stamps.  I stamped the purple poppies (40-372 Divine) onto linen texture card stock with my favorite permanent black dye ink (India Ink Black by Superior), inking only one part of one flower of the stamp, then masked the flower, and stamped the other right over part of the mask to make it appear to be behind the first flower.  I really wanted to focus close-up on the flowers for this card.  

I used Tim Holtz distress markers in dusty concord, seedless preserves, and milled lavendar on the poppies.  I start with the lightest shade (milled lavendar) and color an entire petal.  Then I add the medium shade, and kind of flick it into the lighter shade about half way up.  Finally, I add the darkest shade and flick that part of the way up the petal, then go back to the lightest shade and blend it all out.  I add water to soften and complete the watercolor look. 

This works great with these distress markers, because they are made to react with each other, and with water.  When finished, I realized I needed some darker shades near the bottom of the petals and where the petals overlap, so I added tiny touches of black.  I decided not to blend out the flicked lines, as I liked the way they look like veins of the petals.

I shaded the background with a very light coat of seedless preserves, using a Clarity brush and a very light touch.  I stamped some parts of various PB stamps lightly on the background, including 1999L letter background, 2007E scroll border, 1989E harlequin border, and 30-014 salutations (best wishes).  Finally, I dusted in some hickory smoke along the edges of the panel. I adhered teh panel to black, then onto a white linen card.

Best wishes is embossed in white on a piece of black scrap, and adhered with dimensional tape.  Black rhinestones complete the card. 

I am adding my card to the following challenges:

Addicted To Stamps Challenge  - Flowers

Penny Black Saturday Challenge - Birthday (in honor of their 8th birthday as a challenge blog - Congratulations)!

Penny Black At Allsorts - Flower Power

Tuesday Throwdown Challenge - watercolor

Thanks so much for stopping in.  Be sure to check out these challenge blogs...it's not too late to enter! 

Blessings,

lynda