spring butterflies

The other day I was running errands with my youngest daughter, Hana, and as we were walking into the store we could hear birds chirping. She was so excited to hear them and we talked about how happy we were that it was spring now and the birds are back. "And the BUTTERFLIES, too!" exclaimed Hana. "Well, maybe not quite yet because butterflies don't like the cold and snow..." I said. "YES, they are here! I saw an orange one!" she insisted.

Well, if they aren't here yet, they will be soon (we just have to get rid of our snow!) and that prompted me to pull out my Butterfly Kisses set and stamp my own butterflies for spring.

I grabbed my pastels and went back to the basics of stamping by using the poppin' pastels technique. Do you remember the first time that you tried this? How amazing it was to see the image appear right before your eyes as you ran your cottonball across your image that had been stamped in Versamark ink? Have you used your pastels lately?

To start off I stamped the butterfly base in the Papertrey Pallete inks on kraft cardstock. I let these completely dry. You can do this when your Pallete ink is not completely dry for a bit of a different look that I will show you a little later...

I stamped the polka dot butterfly overlay over the top of the base with the Versamark ink. Some of my stamps are stained from using my black inks on them, this can actually help you see better where you are lining up your image...

I like to use a soft, dry watercolor brush to apply the pastels to my images. It gives me so much more control with where I want my color to go. When I want to change color I dust my brush off on a piece of scratch paper. Experiment with applicators to see what you like best. You could use a brush, cotton balls, cotton swabs, or a sponge dauber when doing this technique.

Don't just use one color - here I used a dark brown for the body, blended that right into the red color and used blue on the butterfly wing tips. This really gives the butterfly a natural, soft look. Naturey things like butterflies, flowers, and leaves are perfect for practicing your color blending.

The butterflies that you see on the smaller piece of kraft cardstock were done when the Pallete ink base was not completely dry. The base picked up the color of the pastels I was using and gave it a little bit deeper, richer look.

Next I cut out the butterflies...

And arranged them onto the card bases. I used the polka dot square, circle, and oval from the Borders and Corners sets on the kraft base. 

Mixed Messages was the perfect set to choose sentiments  for my cards. The butterflies and sentiments are adhered to the cards with dimensionals to pop them just a bit from the base.

The butterflies almost look ready to fly off the card! Thanks for visiting and happy spring!

Rustic Butterfly cards

supplies:

stamps: Butterfly Kisses, Mixed Messages, Borders and Corners {square}, {circle} & {oval} (Papertrey Ink)

ink: Aqua Mist, Spring Moss, Berry Sorbet (Papertrey Ink), Versamark (Tsukineko), Whisper White craft (Stampin' Up!), Jet Black Archival (Ranger)

cardstock: Stamper's Select White (Papertrey Ink), Close to Cocoa, kraft (Stampin' Up!)

accessories: pastels (Stampin' Up!), watercolor brush, 1" circle punch (EK Success), dimensionals