Hi, it’s Jan Tinklenberg, and I was so geeked to learn of this release and the new Mondo Sakura set by Julie Ebersole! I love Julie’s stamps, especially her Mondo floral sets, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this set, which was to create a bokeh background using Copic markers.
I started out by stamping the flowers with my MISTI with Memento London Gray, because I wanted a soft look, not quite light enough for line-free coloring, but not as dark as a black would be.
I looked at a lot of photos of sakura flowers to choose my colors. I colored the flowers with Copics, using the second red violet blending group, which starts with RV10 and goes to RV19. I also used R59 for the deepest red. The leaves were colored with YG21, YG23, and YG25. I used the Toner Grays, T0 and T1, to add some shadows on the petals. I used the colorless blender (0) to help blend the colors on the largest flower.
Once I got the flowers colored in, I laid in a soft background using the Copic Toner Gray marker assortment, with darker grays behind the flowers, moving out to the lighter grays towards the edge of the card stock. I then started adding different sizes of circles to create the bokeh effects with the lightest RV10, some of the slightly darker grays, and I added some blender pen circles to push the color much lighter. I overlapped circles and made sure to have some go off the edge. Grouping background elements in the center of the card stock will make your piece look crowded and awkward. The trick of creating a nice background is to make it look like you are looking through a window, with background elements only partially seen around the edges, or like cutting a piece of patterned fabric, where elements will be on the edge and cut in half. Once I finished coloring, I cut the piece using the largest MFT Stamps Wonky Stitched Rectangle die and popped it above my card base with a white Scrapbook Adhesive 3-D Creative Sheet.
The final touch in coloring was to add some white highlights to the stamens using a Sakura Gelly Roll 05 white gel pen.
I used the matching dies to die cut the word “beautiful” from Bazzill Card Shoppe Candy Bar card stock and adhered it to the card front with a Sakura Quickie Glue Pen. I stamped the words “you” and “are” from the Mondo Sakura set in Versamark on the same color card stock and heat embossed in Hero Arts White EP, then cut it in a thin strip and mounted it above “beautiful” on the card front. I added some Pretty Pink Posh Sparkling Clear sequins to the card for a little bling.
Thank you for geeking out with me over this set, and I hope you have as much fun coloring it as I did!
Supplies:
