Beautiful Details - AECP

Hi friends...welcome back!  Where has the time gone since my last AECP project and class???  Time to get back at it!  This class was taught by the extremely talented Marika Rahtu and as you can tell from the title is is all about the beautiful details that will elevate your cardmaking!  As they say...it's all in the details and in this case it is all in the beautiful details.  

Okay so for this class I will admit, I was absolutely and most definitely intimidated by both the instructor herself and the lessons.  I thought there was no way I was going to be able to live up to her talents and even the techniques she taught.    Marika is so talented and made it look so easy.  She is a wonderful teacher and it was a pleasure to learn from her.  So anyways....I am most definitely not an expert when it comes to colouring, if anything the complete opposite, if I am to be completely honest.  So for that reason I kind of put off making a project for this class.  One of the class lessons she taught us was about colouring on vellum.  So I thought....no problem Michelle, you can do this! I have coloured on vellum before with Copic markers and it  is a bit different than on regular cardstock.  You don't get the nice blending on vellum, so it is a bit more challenging.  But off I went to create my card.

I first started off by heat embossing in rose gold embossing powder 2 of the flowers (I did do a flower from another set, but didn't end up using it) and the leaves as well, from the Practically Perfect stamp set.  To colour on vellum you need to flip it over and colour on the back of it, so as not to potentially ruin the tips of your markers.  So because of this, your colours will be a bit softer than they normally would.  So I started with some warm grey and very light pinks, as I wanted to try and keep it soft like Marika's was but I eventually ended up adding darker and brighter pinks and even a purple, so the grey kind of completely disappeared.  And because of that the softness of it kind of was non-existent.  I then fussy cut them out and set them aside.

For my background I used the Flowing Droplets Stencil and started by blending Morning Frost ink, but it was a wee bit too light so I went in with Evening Gray and it darkened it up a little.  I concentrated most of the ink blending in the bottom left hand corner of a piece of white cardstock cut to 3.75" x 5".  I still wasn't happy with it so I went in and added a bit of Cotton Candy over it to bring in some pink.  I think I may have gone a bit too dark but oh well...the blend of those colours is really pretty.  

I wanted to add a bit more interest to it and also because I need to add black splatters to everything lol, I kept the stencil in place and added some post it notes to mask off the open area of the cardstock and flicked on some black paint, as I only wanted it on the ink blended areas.  I carefully removed my stencil so as not to smudge any of the wet splatters and set it aside to dry for a few minutes.  Once it was all dry I trimmed it down a little bit more to 3.5" x 4.75".  I arranged my flowers and leaves on the bottom left corner of the cardstock and adhered them using a mix of foam tape and and glue....strategically adding the adhesives where it would be covered by the more solid areas of embossing.  Also because they were coloured as well, that helped hiding the adhesives.  I also heat embossed on black cardstock the sentiment from the Adore You stamp set and popped that up using foam adhesive.

 

All that was left was of course to add a few rose gold sequins and that was it.  This was definitely a bit more of a struggle than usual and it didn't quite turn out as soft as I wanted to...I loved how delicate and soft Marika's card was.  So I am definitely going to be revisiting these lessons and working on my skills, but I was happy with it in the end.  I have definitely learned alot from this class and I know that I will absolutely continue to learn from the amazing Marika.

 

Thank you so very much for stopping by today...it is very much appreciated!  I hope you all have the most wonderful and crafty day!  

Until next time,

Michelle 💗

Supplies Used:

• Practically Perfect Stamp Set - Altenew
  
• Adore You Stamp Set - Altenew
• Flowing Droplets Stencil - Altenew
• Morning Frost, Evening Gray and Cotton Candy Crisp Dye Ink - Altenew
• Copic markers- various colours
• Rose Gold Embossing Powder - WOW Embossing
• Rose Gold sequins - Pretty Pink Posh
• blending brushes
• Wendy Vecchi Make Art Station - Ranger
  
• white cardstock
• ivory cardbase
• black cardstock
• foam adhesive
• liquid adhesive
• embossing ink pad - WOW Embossing