The Challenge #43

Hello everyone!  I have some very exciting news today!  The lovely Lesley from the Always Playing with Paper blog, and the creator of The Challenge, has invited me to be on The Challenge design team!  I love challenges and was thrilled to say yes and join in on the fun.  So I'm here today with my first post for Challenge #43 which is a lovely inspiration photo.

 

There's so much to be inspired by in this photo, right?  Let me show you what inspired me.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the beautiful brick wall.  I would LOVE to have a wall like that in my house, wouldn't you?!  I used a Crafter's Workshop brick stencil, PTI Soft Stone ink, and my blending tool, to make my background.  I also splattered it with some of the Soft Stone ink mixed with water.  The next thing I did was pick out some colors from the inspiration photo, the pink and blue, and green from the plants.  I used Winnie & Walter's In Bloom: Lola's Bouquet to make my flowers.  First I added some Worn Lipstick and Broken China distress stains to the back of the flower stamp and stamped that on watercolor paper.  When it was dry I turned the stamp over and used the outline and Wplus9 Silver Lining ink to stamp over the watercolor.  Next I fussy cut the flowers.  For the leaves I used some Gansai Tambi watercolors.  I colored 2 shades of green on watercolor paper and when it was dry I used a PTI leaf die to cut.  The sentiment is from PTI.  When I assembled my card I added some twine under the flowers since there are a lot of textiles in the inspiration photo (I wanted to soften things a bit).  I added some clear Wink of Stella to my flowers, and some sequins to finish things up.

I hope this inspires you to try your hand at this challenge!  I can't wait to see what you create :)