First up- my clean and simple genius project.
I started with embossing a few of the chicks and balloons from the Happy Hippos and Beary Special Birthday sets onto watercolor paper with platinum embossing powder. I watercolored those with distress inks. Next, I watercolored a swatch of the paper and die cut the word Celebrate from that once it was dry. To make it pop a bit more, I covered it with clear embossing.
In order to add some other interest to the clean and simple design, I popped up all the chicks and balloons. I also had them extend over the one layer to make it more visually interesting.
Next up, the Coloring Virtuoso project. It's kind of funny, I wasn't really planning on entering this one. I have a lot of Copics and pencil crayons, but I hardly feel like a virtuoso with those mediums. However, after watercoloring the chicks and balloons on the previous card, I thought, hey whynot do that, but even more!
So I stamped and embossed even more images from the Happy Hippos and Beary Special Birthday sets. Once those were all painted and cut out, I figured out the rest of the card. I wanted the party scene to have a fun backdrop, so I used the Sun Ray Stencil and some Distress Oxide Inks. If you're wondering how I managed to get the longer rays considering the placement of the "sun" on this stencil- I did most of it and then rotated and realigned the stencil to get the rest of the coverage that I wanted.
Finally, the last step was adding a frame to help it all pop! I die cut 2 layers of the largest die from the Stitched Scallop Edge Rectangles dies and adhered that to my stenciled background and placed everyone and everything just so! I finally added a sentiment (also from Beary Special Birthday).
I've included another shot below, as the platinum embossing powder looks totally amazing as an outline in person, but it's a touch tricky to photograph.
