Inspiration Challenge #16: Elegant Water Lily prints

I'm cleaning up my stamping space (yes, still - it will take a while) and one of my projects was to go through my huge stack of inspiration ideas. I've been gathering these for months now and I had to admit that some of them weren't going to be used. But I found a few that I'd forgotten about and really loved. One was this set of water lily prints from Ballard Designs. If you click here you can zoom in to see all the gorgeous detail up close.

This card came out quite different from my initial vision of it, but I really like it. I started it yesterday but knew that I would use today's SCS sketch challenge if at all possible. So once I saw the very unusual layout we were to use, the card had to go in an unexpected direction! I figured the quickest way to get the oval shape would be to use my Marvy punches.

I wanted to do some watercoloring for this card - I wish I had a water lily stamp! Instead I went with the flower and leaf images from the level 2 hostess set called Infinite Goodness. I stamped and masked both images with jet black Stazon on watercolor paper until I had a nice-size area covered. For the coloring I used my Aqua Painter with vanilla and apricot watercolor crayons for the flower petals, cocoa for the flower centers, and olive and artichoke for the leaves. Then I took my soft sky reinker, dropped one drop onto the open lid of the ink pad, and colored in the background with the Aqua Painter. I think I'll have to play with this style of watercoloring some more - I love that SU products offer so many different ways to get this effect.

I did all the coloring yesterday and then set aside my watercolored panel until I saw the sketch this morning. I was a little heartsick to think I was going to punch something out of it to get the oval. I mean, I spent a long time doing the coloring, and I had a good-sized panel. I really hesitated with my punch - thinking, do I really want to do this? I moved the punch around several times and finally held my breath and just went with it. What I liked was that I had a complete flower that I could cut out from another part of the panel, so I mounted that over the bottom with dimensionals. Then I put it onto a larger scalloped oval punched from olive cardstock, sponged the edges with cocoa ink, and felt happy with the result.

Now on to the rest. To imitate the script panels, I wanted my background to look aged, so I very lightly rubbed some cocoa and olive ink over soft sky cardstock with a paper towel. Then I stamped the En Francais background with basic black. After I cut my panel to size, I inked the edges with more cocoa, and layered it onto an olive panel that also had been edged with cocoa.

The last step was the sentiment - I couldn't figure out where to put it so I got out the 5/8" olive grosgrain ribbon and hemp twine so I could make a tag. I stamped "wonderful" from Warm Words in black on soft sky, then punched out and layered onto an olive tag, inking edges in cocoa again. Once I tied the olive ribbon on, I punched a 1/16" hole from the tag and attached it to the ribbon with the twine. Then I layered everything onto a vanilla card. And in case you're wondering, it's a Mother's Day card - it says Happy Mother's Day on the inside.

If you want to upload a challenge card to SCS please use keyword DSIC16 this week, and don't forget to leave a comment here so everyone can see!