Birthday Focal Point

     I love how this card turned out.  I used Yana Smakula's perfect card making formula to make this for my daughter's 19th birthday.  I use to make my own "word greeting" background cardstock pieces.  This is the last of it.  I always liked those pieces and I believe I need to make more because the graphic black and white is very nice.  My daughter likes black cards, but she also loves old fashioned items with florals.
     I didn't have any foil or I would have made the frame in black foil.  I used glitter paper instead.  I used Copics to color the floral image, punched out a butterfly and added some darker copic markings to it, then I added a banner with a greeting.  I also added a clear gemstone to the side of the focal point frame.  Voila. The stitched edge outer frame was all it needed.
     I am in love with Yana's cards and this formula she uses can be modified as you can see.  She uses a white background, but I used a black and white one.  She uses foil but I used glitter paper.  It is close enough to the original formula and I will definitely keep this in mind when trying to create another special card.

Highlighted Floral

     I wanted to play with my Copic markers so I stamped these flowers and leaves, colored them, then stamped first and second generation pencil eraser dots coming out from the focal image.  I used several yellow copic markers to fade the colored background away from the edge.  Then I took a white gel pen to the edges of the flower petals and highlighted them.  I saw someone do that once on YouTube and thought I would give it a try.  It is rather bold and not my usual style but I think I like it.
     I stamped the thanks greeting on the actual card base because I wanted a one layer card (which is the kind I prefer to make) but I decide to do it in orange.  It just had the orange outline and didn't look good so I found this pre-made thanks greeting that was already on the white background piece.  I had previously colored it in a color that went nicely with the card.  I put two small pieces of folded black ribbon behind the greeting, used foam dots to raise the greeting and used some yellow enamel accents to put dots on the background within the floral focal piece.
   

Copic Jumpstart lesson 7

Ellen Hutson Mondo Hydrangea by Julie

     The lesson of the day was flowers.  I use to color each petal as individual shaded circles or ovals.  With the hydrangea however I looked at hydrangeas at the store and preferred the ones with yellow centers.  Initially I colored the two bottom ones and really liked them, but for class I experimented and colored another set identically, except I added the complementary color around the edges to shade, then went over them with the initial color.  Just a tiny bit of complementary color shows here and there around the edges and it also darkens the color.  I think I prefer it even though I really like the inital way I did them.  I guess I just need to continue to do them multiple ways since every way seems to be good.  (Sorry that the images on the left are blurry.  I'm not sure how that happened.  A light box is on my wish list but will probably take a year or two until I can afford one.)