Blossoming Trees

We received about 5 inches of snow today, right on top of the rain and ice that fell last night. To say it was a difficult ride to work this morning, is an understatement! So the card I want to share today was created in hopes of blue skies, warm temps and brand new blossoms on the trees.

I had no idea how this card would turn out when I started it. All I knew was that I wanted to use the Hero Arts Tree Trunks stamp and add some pretty pink flowers. The background was shaded, using distress inks and I first stamped the image by coloring the stamp with a gray, Marvy marker. I then stamped the trees again, onto a separate piece of white cardstock with Hero Arts Latte, Chalk Ink and I wanted to make them look more rough and textured. What I did next is a bit hard to explain, so please bear with me.



You can see that I added a layer of glossy accents on each trunk to make them shiny, but I used the glossy accents to do something else before that. I added some blobs, splotches and smears of it, up and down each trunk. Then I used my heat gun on them, until the glossy accents bubbled and boiled. I let it cool just a bit and pressed each of these bubbly areas with my finger, then colored them with a dark brown Copic marker. After that, I covered each trunk with a shiny, smooth layer of the glossy accents. I hope that made sense!

After the image was all dry, I cut out each tree and adhered them onto the gray, stamped trees, offsetting them a bit for a shadow effect. The little flower I used is from the Hero Arts, Thinking of You set, and was stamped several times, colored, cut out and added to the trunks. The birds are from the Flower Bird Garden, white embossed and also colored and cut out.

Sorry about that long explanation, but I thought some of you might want to know the techniques I used.

Thanks so much for coming by! Hope you're in a warmer place than I am! I'll just keep ~dreaming~ of spring. . . . . .