Billowing Peonies – July Altenew Inspriration Challenge

The July Altenew Inspiration Challenge just launched and the challenge colors are a beautiful combination of soft cotton candy pink, a blue-ish shade of lilac, and a bright yellow-green. The lovely colors are featured in the image below.

For my design, I knew straightaway I wanted to use my gorgeous Altenew Billowing Peonies stamp set and that I wanted to copic color by hand versus using the coordinating stencil. I set to work stamping the largest image from the set onto an 8.5″ x 5.5″ half sheet of Copic X-press it paper. I then pulled out several copics from my BV (BV17, BV04, BV13, BV02, and BV01) RV (RVRV63, RV55, RV52, and RV000), and YG (YG25, YG23, and YG01) color families and got to work.

Note…for some of my shadowy shades of green in this image I overpaint or under-paint with an N2 copic. Warm and Neutral Grays along with your lightest Blue Violet and Violet shades are amazing at adding shadows to your brighter colors families. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Once I was done coloring the image, I knew I wanted to add in additional elements to really make this card shine. One technique I realized I hadn’t used in some time was paper piecing. I went through my giant stash of pattern paper, looking for any smaller print patterns that would match with my color story and I came across a 12″ x 12″ Recollections paper pad, I bought from Michael’s the very first week I decided to try out paper crafting. This cute floral pad has paper in every color and was exactly what I needed to polish off my card. Of course I still had it. No pretty paper is ever tossed aside.

After stamping the image on smaller pieces of pink and purple pattern paper, I selected the petals I knew I wanted to replace and I pulled out my N0, N1, and N2 copic grays to added shading to the pattern paper petals. Once shaded, I fussy cut each petal and glued them to the card.

Now complete, it then became a matter of what card size to use. After all of my hard work, I knew I wouldn’t be able to cut down the peony image to fit a standard A2 card size and so I went big and selected a 5″ x 7″ size. I first cut a mat out of coordinating pink card stock and attached it to a 7″ x 10″ card base made from Neenah 110lb card stock. I then trimmed my image to 4.75″ x 6.75″ and added it to my pink mat and base. For the sentiment, I stamped and die cut “You’re on my Mind” in honor of a close friend using the Grand Carnations Build-A-Garden stamp and coordinating die set. I added several additional die cuts for extra dimension. Finally, I finished everything off with some Crafty Meraki rhinestones and my card was good to go. I truly am in love with the results.