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Holiday Card Featuring Bokeh Watercoloring

By Cards

Hi All,

This past weekend marked a “Hallmark Holiday” like no other – International Card Making Day! For many in the crafting world, it is a great way to share and encourage one another. For me, it’s a fun way to see what other cardmakers are up to, and in the process, I tend to find some products that I may feel like trying out. It’s also a great way to meet some new folks and in on some craft themed conversations.

This holiday also marks the start of the holiday card making season. It’s a time when it seems new products are widely released and available. Now I’ve got to be honest and say I’ve started my holiday cards a few weeks ago. I’m not much of a Halloween card maker, so I just seem to skip right over that and go directly into Christmas. One thing I like to do around this time of year is to join a holiday-themed card class. Typically that involves taking a course over at Online Card Classes. Call it a type of continuing education of sorts – I love what they share over there and it sparks the start to so many more ideas! This class is called Merry Making and it has already taught something I didn’t know – Bokeh! Upon googling the term, I realized I knew the look, but didn’t have a word to define it. Have you ever had that? Where you know what something looks like or how to describe it, but you don’t know the technical term for what it is your describing? …Well, that’s how I felt immediately after looking this up!

I wanted to give the technique a try and recreate an image I saw in my google search. It had a gradient of greens to blues and a bokeh filter on top. I thought it would be a gorgeous background for a simple sentiment.

I decided to use Tim Holtz Distress Inks in the colors Shabby Shutters, Evergreen Bough, Peeled Paint, Forest Moss, Peacock Feathers, Salty Ocean and Chipped Saphire. I made sure to blend the inks very well and use a light hand in the process as well. Here’s a look at the inks all blended and highlighted (I shared this picture over on my Instagram)

To create the bokeh pattern I used some clean water and my no.4 Silver Black Velvet watercolor brush to paint circles. Since distress ink reacts with water, the inks pooled up and then were removed with a dry paper towel. I painted several layers on top and besides one another to achieve the look you see. I wanted to define the circle and used a silver gelly roll pen to draw those in.

Here’s a closer look at the shimmery pen details.

It is very subtle but makes all the difference.

Thanks so much for stopping by and I hope to see you again real soon with another holiday project.

OCC Rainbow Maker Using Diecuts

By Cards, Planner Stationary & Accessories

Hi All,

Welcome back! Today’s card for OCC Rainbow maker is touching the subject of die-cuts. I personally do not own a whole lot of the steel die cuts that many crafters and card makers seem to enjoy. Although there are so many out there, I find myself enjoying using a die cutting machine (like the silhouette) to create most of my die-cut images. The one nice perk to using steel dies is that they give a nice softened edge to all your cuts. I wish that was true with the silhouette, but currently, it’s not.

Knowing that I wanted a softened edge I decided to go with one of the few dies I do have. This floral stem die is from spellbinders and is the most delicate die-cut I have ever used. I knew I wanted to keep most of it white and create a lot of white space on the card. But, this is a rainbow maker class and I had to try and create some color. I decided to just ink the edges of each flower. I used a small sponge and tapped them in some distress inks to get these colors. I did try a round of this card using color pencils, which also works great, but I didn’t like seeing all the pencil strokes on my project.

To finish off the card, I mounted the die onto a white panel and sandwiched a piece of turquoise vellum between it and the card base. The base is embossed but kept simple again to give the look of lots of white space.

This card is probably the simplest of cards I have made for this class. I think the results are subtle and liked the overall results.

I hope you join me again tomorrow for another look at a card from my experience with OCC Rainbow Maker. See you then.

OCC Rainbow Maker Using Embossing Powders

By Cards, Planner Stationary & Accessories

Hi All,

Hope you are having a great day and enjoying the cards I’ve been sharing as part of my participation in OCC Rainbow Maker. For today’s card, I decided to take some of the brightest and boldest embossing powders I have and create a rainbow gradient as my colorful background. To do this technique I simply covered a piece of heavyweight cardstock in Versa mark ink (a very sticky ink) and then used my fingers to pinch up some embossing powders and coat parts of the sticky page. I used my fingers as I felt that was the best way to get control on how much powder would fall at different parts of the gradient. They all seemed to blend together perfectly using this method.

I also liked how some of the granules can be seen throughout the card but doesn’t overpower the other colors. For example, you may notice a few grains of pink and purple are in the yellow, but the yellow still stands out on its own.

I really like this technique of embossing and the results it gives. It gives me vibes of a color festival where they throw colored powder up in the air (kind of like the color run marathons in the city).

I hope you enjoyed reading about this technique and I’ll see you again tomorrow with an all new card.

 

OCC Rainbow Maker-Bonus Card Using Scraps

By Cards, Planner Stationary & Accessories

Hi All,

As you can see, I’ve been busy creating tons of cards with lots of colorful backgrounds and patterns. As I was creating cards and trimming down panels to use on card fronts I ended up with quite a bit of trimmed pieces of paper. As I started to sweep them across my desk, they caught my eye for a second and I knew I had just challenged myself.

I grabbed a piece of white cardstock and laid out the stripes and found that they once again created their own rainbow in a sense. I decided to create a card using them and here’s it is!

If you’ve been following along with the cards I’ve created this past week you may notice bits and pieces from other cards.

I thought it was kinda of a fun concept and just had to share it with my readers.

Thanks so much for stopping by and I’ll be back tomorrow with a new card for rainbow maker.