Year of Flowers: Larkspur

Edit for question: You mentioned embossing before coloring but don't Copics "melt" the embossing away and smear it if you color too close to it? I didn't seem to have a problem with my embossed image so for me it worked fine. Thanks for the question.

Hey there friends. Today I'm sharing a beautiful card made with Nichole's next stamp set in the Year of Flowers series. This month's flower is Larkspurs. When working with flower stamps, I always do a google search for the specific flower to get an idea of the colors and varieties of flowers. I found this great photo collage below that shows several varieties of Larkspurs. Although most of the photos I found were a vibrant, deep purple, I chose to use more muted shades of purple for my project today.

When working with Papertrey stamp sets, I often think of questions that customers may have about the set. For many of you, I can imagine that simply coloring the image can be a bit intimidating, right? My best tip for you is to find images of real flowers so that you can imitate the highlights and shadows and colors.
Another tip for coloring floral images, especially with Copics, is to emboss the image first like I did with Versamark and gold embossing powder. The raised, embossed outlines create simple areas for you to color, making it very easy to stay in the lines. The shiny, gold embossing also makes for a pretty fancy card. I'm using this pretty card as an anniversary card for my parents this month. By using the yellow ink and new Harvest Gold ribbon, it really plays up the yellow gold color of the embossing powder. Be sure to zoom in on the photo below to see how pretty the close up image is.

Another question that I think you might have about the larger flower images in the Year of Flowers stamp sets is how to use such a large image on a regular size card? Nichole has designed all of her flower sets so far to fit on an A2 size card. But you can easily use a larger size card too. Or you can do what I've done and simply use just a portion of the image on a project. For my card, I first stamped Heather's new Library Card image onto my cardstock. Next I stamped and embossed the entire flower image. I then cut out the library card, which left only a portion of the flowers. The flowers blend in so pretty with the ink on the Library Card stamp.

To finish off the card, I chose Papertrey patterned papers in pretty, soft colors. I'm all about combining lots of colors on my projects this month. I used Harvest Gold ribbon around the main Larkspur image along with some double layered buttons tied with brown and white twine. Don't worry about covering up the colored image with ribbon and embellishments. Enough of the beautifully, colored image still shows through.

Here's the Copic colors I used to color the gold, embossed image.

Sooo, I hope you enjoyed my projects. Don't be intimated by images that are colorable. Get out those Copics and start practicing. It adds so much to your projects. Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to visit Nichole's blog for her entire post on the Larkspur flowers and links for other countdown projects.