With the Help of Freshly Made Sketches

I know the trend in card making is now about florals and bright colors.  I’ve found myself getting too comfortable with those designs.  I wanted to change it up a bit (at least for me) by using colors that I never really even think of when starting a card – orange and navy.

Now, for the design…I went to one of my usual sites for inspiration–Freshly Made Sketches.  Here is the latest sketch…

While I usually don’t follow their sketches to the letter, I just received a new stamp set that is perfect—Hampton Arts Lift Me Up.  The detailed butterfly is gorgeous, and the sayings are terrific.

I started off by white heat embossing the butterfly on navy Bazzill card stock towards the bottom right corner of the paper.  I wanted this image to be kind of a shadow for the main butterfly.  Next, I stamped the butterfly  with Momento Tuxedo Black ink and cut it out with the matching die.  I colored the butterfly with Copic markers and added a few small white extras with my white gel pen.  I attached the butterfly with foam tape to give it some dimension.  For the last touch, I covered the butterfly with my Wink of Stella clear glitter pen.  The “You Lift Me Up” greeting from the stamp set seemed to perfect, so I white heat embossed it on the bottom left corner.

I knew that I needed to accent the card with some orange to balance the orange butterfly, so I cut the navy card stock slightly so that I could have a strip of orange on the left side of the card.  Then, I realized that the card front was still a little dark, so I trimmed a slight edge off of the top and bottom so that the white card base would peak through.  Once all of that was done, this card still needed something else.  I’ve really been trying to incorporate sequins (another card trend) on to my cards, but I didn’t have any orange ones (remember, orange is not one of my go-to colors 🙂  Then, I remembered seeing Jennifer McGuire use her Copic markers to color some pearl accents.  I found my pearl dots and colored them with one of the same orange Copic markers that I used on the butterfly.  They were the perfect final touch on my card.

I hope you like it!