Sunshine & Bee Designs : 2020

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Sunshine Flowers SBD

Hi there!

I’m back on the SBD blog with another design and this time I am doing a masking and stamping technique using ‘Sunshine Flowers’ to create this sunflower bouquet that is perfect for Mother’s Day. I wanted to try a new colouring medium for this project and so I dusted off my watercolour pencils.

Firstly I made some masks using all the flower and leaf images from the set before I stamped the large sunflower on to some watercolour paper with distress ink in tea dye. I masked off the large flower and stamped the small sunflower around the large one, arranging it in a certain way and with the colour I roughly filled in the petals.

With an aqua brush I started to pull out the pigment to fill out the petals, ensuring the gaps are covered. I experimented dry watercolour pencil on a wet image to see what effect I would get and So, I began adding some shades. I liked the soft overall effect it gave but as a whole, it did not stand out as much as I wanted it to. I then outlined all the sunflowers in a brown fine line pen adding a few lines on the petals to make the sunflowers stand out. I left the leaves as it it because I wanted the sunflowers to be the main focus. Once all the colouring, shading and outlining is done, I used my versamark pen to make dots in the centre of the flowers then heat embossed the dots in bronze and fussy cut the image as close to the edge as possible.

For the background I took some A5 cream linen paper and with my vintage photo distress ink, I stencilled in the Plaid design down the centre. I then die cut a frame out of some recycled kraft card using the largest size from hunky dory moonshine scallop edge frame dies.

Finishing off, I heat embossed the sentiment in black on the bottom right corner and mounted the scallop frame and the sunflowers on to the stencilled background with some 3mm foam strips then I added some yellow sparkly gems before I attached it onto an A5 kraft card base.

I really enjoyed using the watercolour pencils today as it was so easy to use and most importantly, no mess! I didn’t even need to take out a painting pallet as there wasn’t any colour mixing involved in this project. I hope today’s card will give you some inspiration and lift your mood today as sunflowers are known to be ‘happy’ flowers. Thank you for stopping by.

x Ali x

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Sunshine & Bee Designs

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The little paper tree UK

For all your crafting needs

Acrylic Glue

Cosmic shimmer

Scallop & Straight Edge Nesting Dies

Moonstone By Hunkydory

Mixed media paper

Daler Rowley

Distress Inks:

Vintage photo

foam strips

Stix

Nail art assorted Gems

Kraft Card Stock

Craft stash UK

Watercolour pencils

Derwent

Plaid Stencil

Tim Holtz

Sunday, March 15, 2020

SBD Fluttering By

Hey there!

I’m so excited to share with you some product release from a new stamp company based in U.K called Sunshine and Bee Designs created by Jeni Machon. I love love these photopolymer stamps and simply could not wait to start having fun with them. There is a total of 8 sets and are all made in the U.K. Here are 3 out of 8 samples of the stamps that I will be using to make some cards to showcase the new stamp sets that’s to be released on 25th February 2020.

‘Fluttering By’

Today I am starting with the ’Fluttering by’ butterflies set to create an ethereal shaker card with a spring inspired pastel colour pallet. I start by creating a background with an A5 sheet of mixed media paper using distress oxide ink in Cracked Pistachios, tea Dye, Spun sugar and Worn Lipstick to create a transitional colour blend.

As I left the blended paper to settle and dry. I start with the vellum window. First I stamped all three of the butterflies in various positions on vellum before heat embossing the images in ‘Lapis Pearl Lusture’, then I used a stitched scallop edge die and manually created a border with white card stock to frame the embossed vellum paper with glue before adding super thin foam strips beneath the border to create a ‘pocket’ for the shaker elements.

I then carefully adhere the inked background on to the vellum window with the shaker elements in place and attached it to a white card base. Now to add a focal image and sentiment, I heat embossed two more butterfly images on vellum paper and on white card stock in Rose Gold then fussy cut all four images out and stacked the butterfly vellum on top of the matching solid images ensuring only the bodies are attached and not the wings, I noticed that some of the embossing had flaked off from the vellum from careless handling but I liked the edgy look it gave. Finishing off, I heat embossed the sentiment ‘Fluttering by to say...’ in rose gold on a black flag strip and added some gems to the butterfly bodies and sparsely on the vellum window for some sparkle.