Wildflower Masked Background

Bring on Spring, I say! In the meantime, I'd love to show you how to create some beautiful floral backgrounds. I'm using Lisa Johnson's new Life stamp set which is full of floral silhouettes.

I'm going to show you how to do some masking, which means you cover up an area so that no ink gets underneath it. I'm using Eclipse Masking Tape which is THE perfect product for all your masking. It's sticky but repositionable so that you can use the mask over and over, or until you wear your mask out. And it's very thin paper so when you stamp over the mask, there are no shadow lines, it's all very crisp. You can find it at Eclectic Paperie or Ellen Hutson, LLC...links at the left under the shopping category.

Okay, to start out I stamped a floral silhouette onto my masking tape and then cut out that shape with some fine tip scissors. For this mask, I didn't worry about getting exactly around all the leaves precisely. You'd be forever and day doing that!
For my stamping surface, I used a 1/4 sheet of Shimmer White Cardstock. I layed my floral mask down and used a finger dabber sponge and Plum Pudding ink to gently rub over the mask. It helps to dab some of the color off onto scratch paper to remove the darkest of the ink from the sponge. You can also use small pieces of sponge if you don't have the finger dabbers.

I then set my mask aside and stamped the same floral silhouette stamp onto my Shimmer White Cardstock using Ripe Avocado ink. Random stamping here.

Then I reached for the lavendar looking silhouette stamp and stamped some more images using Plum Pudding. My background is getting pretty now.

Then I used some Lemon Tart ink to stamp yet another floral silhouette image over my background paper. The yellow is a complimentary color to purple on the color wheel. What does that mean?.....it means that colors opposite on the color wheel look good together. It's art talk and it makes your projects just pop off the page. Just do it, trust me. My background is pretty much complete at this point.

Now for a little twist. A few summers ago, my sister and I pressed some flowers from her flower beds. I have lots of CD tins full of pressed wildflowers so I was excited to get them out again. I dug around carefully and found some actual lavender and some other purple flowers to use. I made a simple card using Kraft cardstock for the base card and sentiment, inking all the edges with Fresh Snow ink. I raised my sentiment portion off the base card using pop dots so that the floral stems could be hidden underneath. I adhered the real flowers to the card using Zip Dry glue..any clear, tacky glue will work. The sentiment is just of the many thoughtful verses that coordinate with the word Life. You will love them all, Lisa did a great job putting together the elements of this set. I finished off the card front with a Vintage New Leaf Button and a snipped of Lavender Moon twill ribbon.
Isn't it beautiful? I've gazed at it by my computer all day! I must make more because this one's heading off to someone who will have a special place for it I know. Check out the photo below by zooming in...you can get a glimpse of how the Shimmer Cardstock looks. It's so much shimmery in real life.
And below is the inside of the card. I repeated some of the floral silhouette images along with the word enjoy to tie in with the outside of the card.
I hope I have inspired you to try some new backgrounds for your cards. Stay tuned to the blogaroonie because I've got another tutorial for how I did THIS BACKGROUND coming up soon. Thanks for visiting today!