By Cheryl Horvath
There is a lot going on with this Father’s Day water color card I made last night but I really love how it turned out. The beautiful swan stamp is from UnityStamp company as well as the sentiment from a really great stamp set called Grow in Grace. The sentiments are awesome in this set!
I started out by stamping the image onto Strathmore 140 lb. water color paper and brought it to life with my Mijello Mission Gold Watercolors. I enhanced the details a bit with a copic fine tip marker and I feathered in some additional white highlights on the swan with my prisma color white pencil. I really love the texture in the background with the embossed craft paper and I think adding a gold embossed gilded edge gave it a really nice touch.
Painting the image was the easy part…I often struggle with how to put the card together once the focal piece is complete. I did not have any thoughts about what the finished card would look like when I started this project…so it was trial and error. I decided that the standard A2 size (4.25 x 5.5 inch) card was not big enough. It was just too cramped and I didn’t want to cover up much of the focal point so I decided to go with a slightly larger card base. This one is 4.5 x 6.5″. This meant making a custom sized envelope which I actually love doing and using an envelope punch board makes it super easy. I stamped the same swan image on the front of the envelope in a light brown ink which ties it together nicely with the card.
Making larger envelopes means having some 12 x 12″ card stock on hand because the standard 8.5 x 11 is too small. I LOVE making custom envelopes. Rather than using plain/solid colored card stock, try using some of your patterned papers that have subtle images. You’ll love the results!