Sunflower Birthday Card

Hi everyone! Carla here today... sorry for the lateness of today's post... I can't believe it's Dec. 28th! I hope you all had a great Christmas!!

I decided to go a little summery for today's post. I feel like all I've done for the past 2 months is Christmas cards and I needed a change! And you can't go wrong with Sunflowers right?!

The flowers on here started off as white Prima flowers from a pilar pack. I painted them with Sunshine first and then added highlights with Buttercup and darkened the centers with Mango and Chocolate CI Paints. Then I added brown gems to the centers to finish them off.

I painted a scrap of Ranger's Sticky Back Canvas with Chocolate paint and to lighten the center, I added Gesso with a wet paintbrush. Beware that this also masks the shimmer, but for this card, I was fine with shiny edges only. Then I just heat embossed a Happy Birthday message in gold embossing powder over the Gessoed area (is that even a word?... I know you know what I mean!)

As a little extra hint of glimmer, I used Evergreen paint to highlight and darken the leaves on the patterned paper I was using for my background (you can see it in the photo, especially on the right). I often make subtle changes to patterned papers like that, and it helps tie in the very shimmery flowers with the rest of the elements of the card.

Cheers for now!

Carla