Hi everyone, and welcome back! It's Anne here up on the blog today with fun tropical colored hibiscus blooms. I used the new Hibiscus Washi stamp, die, and stencil sets with bright pink, orange, and yellow inks. I even decided to use one of the detail layers for the leaves to apply some silver glitter gel! I love to use stencils to add a little unexpected texture to my cards.

I started by stamping the image using a light gray ink and my MISTI. Then I pulled out the stencil set and colored in those gorgeous, exotic blooms starting with the Fairy Dust collection. I would lightly move my blending brush in circles around the center of the flower, blending out towards the middle of the petal with each color in the set. Keeping the blending tighter and tighter towards the center of the flower as the colors got darker. The most saturated color, Raspberry Bliss, is just at the very center of the flower. Then I used Pinkfresh's Rise and Shine ink cubes in the same way for the outside of the petals, trying to leave some white space between the pink and yellow colors. 

I used colors from the Indian Summer collection, Peach Fuzz, and Apricot, for the smaller additional blooms, with Passion Fruit in the center. I colored in the leaves then put the hibiscus blooms back into the MISTI to have Black Detail ink stamped over it. I used my colored pencils to add just a few extra lines of color here and there, then I used the detail stencil layer of the leaves, to add some fun sparkly silver glitter gel. And when that was dry I die cut everything out.

Then I decided that the design needed some dark contrast/black splatter, which I ended up loving!

I used Pinkfresh's Horizontal Stripe stencil to brush some bright pink and yellow lines onto more white cardstock then used the new Nested Hexagons die to cut a panel of it out and added a jazzy, sparkly silver border to it. I decided to add another layer of texture between the striped panel and the card base so I dry embossed more cardstock with the Sweet Blooms hot foil plate. I trimmed it a bit and adhered it down to an A2-sized card base, with the striped panel going immediately on top of that. I spent some time arranging the blooms, using foam tape where necessary.

I had a citrine, hot foiled sentiment in my stash that was perfect. "You are amazing!" is from the Fancy Script Words hot foil plate. I popped that up with small pieces of foam tape, then added Silver Metallic Pearls, and was done!

I hope some of these design choices have inspired you to make something new today. Thanks so much for stopping by!