If you want to send a card to someone who maybe had something special happen to them or just to send someone a happy thought, make them a card something like this Celebrate Sunflowers Celebrate You Card with these pretty sunflowers!
I felt drawn to make a floral card and the sunflowers won out, hopefully with a bit of a fall look. I actually thought I would use the coordinating Sunflower Dies, but once I stamped and colored the sunflowers in the Celebrate Sunflowers Stamp Set, that was all I wanted to do.
The sunflowers are stamped in Memento Ink because I was going to use our Stampin’ Blends alcohol markers to color in the flowers. I saw that someone had colored in sunflowers with Light Daffodil Delight, Dark Pumpkin Pie, and Dark Mango Melody so I just went with those colors. You could easily choose some other similar colors or a different color scheme entirely. For the leaves, I just used some lighter and some darker greens, probably Granny Apple Green, Old Olive, and maybe some Mossy Meadow. The flower centers are colored with Soft Suede Stampin’ Blends (light and dark) and parts were just kind of dotted, following the stamped image.
The greeting is in the Celebrate Sunflowers Stamp Set but I only wanted to use the “Celebrate You” part of the stamp due to space. I inked up only those words with Old Olive Ink and die cut with one of the Ornate Frames Dies. I felt like it needed something to set it off from the background but I didn’t have much space so I just used the Dark Old Olive Stampin’ Blend marker along the edge of the die cut. Luckily I had a stead enough hand and it worked out well! It might not have, but it did! Then I added some ribbon behind the greeting but I’m not necessarily in love with that on this card. I think I should have used some gems or sequins or something in a few places on the card for that bit of bling.
The coloring might look overwhelming, but really it is not. I just kept the darker colors at the base of the petals and the rest was colored lighter. It’s mostly a solid image so I just colored all of the petals with my lightest color first and then went in and added the two darker colors. Then I went back over some of it with the lightest color to help it all blend. Just put on some music or something and enjoy yourself while you color! It’s great for relaxation!
The card base is Soft Suede and I will need to put a Whisper White layer inside the card since it is a dark cardstock. I’ll stamp one of the little sunflowers somewhere on that piece, maybe coloring it in or maybe just stamping in Soft Suede or a yellow shade and just leaving that as is.
Here’s another card I made by just stamping the small sunflower and some leaves randomly over the front of the card. You can see I didn’t use as much color on the flowers as I did on this card.
Take some time to do some stamping and coloring with whatever coloring technique you like to use!
