Cherry Blossom Inspiration

I've never lived in a place with cherry trees, so I've only seen cherry blossoms when I travel, but I really love them. I especially love the illusion that they are all just a uniform pink from a distance, but when you get close, you can see that they are really magenta, white, pink, even yellow.

I remember in that crazy opening scene of Star Trek - Into Darkness - I thought that the Nibiru planet and its people looked like a living cherry blossom. That was such a cool scene. It is a real work of art from start to finish - someone on that film has some great art chops.

So I think the cherry blossom is why I love pink and yellows together, and I really love it with watercolor. I love roses that are pink with a little hint of yellow too - it's just a soothing combo.

My sweet friend Libby shared the new My Monthly Hero Kit with me for January, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to do some cherry blossom watercolor with it.

There were actually a lot of steps to this first card - it was super fun to make. First I watercolored a background panel with Koi Watercolor - magenta and yellow, just in sort of loose stripes. I attached that to a white card base. There's a SUPER sweet stack of vellum in the kit - if you look at sort of the tiny, bokeh dots in the background, they are actually teeny, iridescent hexagons on the vellum. It's very luminous and pretty. I attached that to the card next.

Then I used one of the six different heart dies in the kit to die cut some watercolor paper, and I did more intense washes of magenta and yellow on that and stamped  the little hearts in white pigment ink to echo that bokeh on the vellum.

Next I took some of the shaker goodies included - just different sizes of iridescent hearts, and glued them to the vellum in random places and then added the die cut valentine sentiment on top of all that. Does anyone else have trouble with "random" placement of things like this on cards? I'm mostly really terrible at it. :).

There are also pre-cut cards and envelopes in there, so I took one of the other dies, which is REALLY fun, and used it on one of the card bases. There are teeny heart dies too, so I cut three hearts from that same vellum with those and added that and sequins to three of the hearts to make them stand out. Hard to see in this photo, but the teeny twine has a gold thread through it, so I cut the sentiment from gold foil paper.

 I decided to try that same die with watercolor paper too and it was super fun - I just watercolored each heart (again with Koi), and then gently popped them up by folding the edges of the hearts together. I used the MISTI to stamp the sentiment twice so that it was perfectly inked. This is just an all-occasion card, but I do like this non-traditional, citrusy color combo for a Valentine card too - you know how I like to break allllll the color rules.

 And, because I have been dying to try out these BARC Wood envelopes by Arc Crafts, I decided to see if emboss resist would work on them with the little hearts - and it did.

I think I'll send Libby a little card in this pretty envelope and we'll report back on how they hold up in the mail. They are are cute - these are a 4 Bar card size, but they also make other sizes, including A2, and are 100% made in the USA - yay!

If you want to get your paws on that kit, it's available while supplies last from my sweet friends at Hero Arts.

Now check out what a few of my friends have done with it!

Hero Arts
Jennifer McGuire
Yana Smakula
Lucy Abrams
Lydia Fiedler (You are here)
Mariana Grigsby
Libby Hickson

Thanks for coming here today.

Loveyameanitbye.