Two cards with one stamp with Sandhya

Happy Sunday! Welcome back to another post form me, Sandhya, on the Crafty Meraki blog. I thought I would take a break form my slimline addiction and try out the split card technique shown by THE Jennifer McGuire. I was looking though my stamps and the Poppy Hawthorn set form Waffle Flower stood out as a great option for this technique. Another fun thing about today's project is to show how you can use holiday colors to use your floral stamps for holiday cards and get more out of your stamps. Here are the simple steps I followed to create 2 cards out of a single colored image of the stamp.

I started with a piece of Fabriano hot pressed watercolor paper and stamped the image using Hickory Smoke Distress Ink. Yes, I am yet to try out specialized inks for no-line coloring, so I try different Distress Inks in Antique Linen and Hickory Smoke for my no-line coloring. Then I used Karin markers to watercolor my flowers. I always lay a first layer of color and let it dry completely before adding a second layer with shadows. I also use clear water to lift paint form a few areas to get better depth.

Another trick for no line coloring is to use 2 very close but different shades of a color for adjacent petals. Here I used Red and Fire Red colors form Karin for the red flowers. I painted the white flowers with clear water and dropped little warn grays in the centers and let the water do the coloring. I then ended up lifting a lot of this color as I didn't like so much gray in my flowers. Using hot pressed watercolor paper and a good watercolor brush allows for effective lifting of unwanted color. This is also a very forgiving medium as it allows you to lift any stray strokes taking colors outside the lines. Finally I added finer details and shadows to the nooks and crannies using color pencils.

After all this coloring, I was excited that I could get 2 cards out of this image. I cut it up right along the centre to get 2 panels with lots of white space and the colored image along one edge. Next I stamped this image again with a dark red ink on to red card stock and trimmed this along the center too. I heat embossed my sentiments with Brutus Monroe Alabaster embossing powder on strips of black carstock. Again the sentiments come from non-holiday stamp sets from my stash - Altenew Paint-a-flower Rose and Altenew Cross Stitch flower stamp set.

Finally I assembled my cards by adhering the white and red panels joined by the black sentiment strip on white A2 card bases. I used a black fine liner to add details to the centers of the flower and a white gel pen to add dots to the stamen. Just as I was about to clean up and put away my stamp set, I realized that I had scribbled a lot of precious inks from my Karin markers on my glass mat. So I quickly stamped the image again on a piece of cold pressed watercolor cardstock lying on my desk and and colored it with the left over inks to make a quick 3rd bonus card. I didn't fuss around to add more inks and shadows, I just simple used up what was left on my mat. I got vibrant reds and faded out greens.

I trimmed this colored panel with the Pinkfresh Studio Dashed Rectangle Die and adhered it to a stamped kraft background form my background basket. I added a black strip with a white heat embossed sentiment to complete my card. I hope you enjoyed my creative process and will look through your stash to give this a try. As always I have linked to products that are available in the Crafty Meraki Store and will be thrilled if you decide to stop by for some retail therapy. And... another good news is that the free shipping threshold is now down to $50.