Coloring and Birthday Blooms

I know that I have mentioned this before, but...I LOVE to color! And I also love flowers, so naturally, the Birthday Blooms stamp set would be a natural choice for me to use when I wanted to do a bit of coloring with Stampin' Up!'s Watercolor Pencils. I thought it would be a good choice to show my process as well. Now, I do not have experience with making videos, so I just did a photo tutorial to share with you.

Here is my finished card, and the process photos will follow:

 All supplies are from Stampin' Up!:

Stamp Set: Birthday Blooms

Inks: StazOn Jet Black Ink

Card stock: Soft Sky, Calypso Coral, Whisper White, Vellum Card Stock

Accessories: Big Shot, Lots of Labels Framelits Dies, 

Springtime Foils Specialty Designer Series Paper (retired), 

Stampin' Up Watercolor Pencils, Dazzling Diamonds Glitter, Dimensionals

The first three colors that I used were: Calypso Coral, Real Red, and Rich Razzleberry, in that order. 

First, I colored the main flower completely with Calypso Coral (except for the little center parts of the flower).

 Then I used Real Red to start the shading process. I started at the bottom of each petal, and then colored going up the petal, but not going all the way to the top, trying to be the darkest at the bottom of the petal.

 In order to make the shadow part of the flower even darker, but not by using the black pencil, I decided to use the Rich Razzleberry pencil at the very base of the petals, and the centermost of the flower (except for the little center knobby parts that will be colored yellow). I followed this same process on the 3 smaller flower buds.

 There are three twigs that I colored with Early Espresso, Daffodil Delight, and Old Olive. The stems I used the Early Espresso on, and the leaves I colored first with Daffodil Delight, then added some Old Olive to give them some more color and depth. (It is a little hard to see. Sorry!) I also colored the center, sticky part of the flower (the stigma) with the Daffodil Delight pencil. (I looked up the name.)

 The larger leaves I colored using the following colors: Old Olive, Daffodil Delight, Pacific Point, and Early Espresso.

I followed the same pattern as with the flowers. Lighter overall color (Old Olive), followed by a darker layer at the base of the leaves to show shadow.

I used a darker layer of Old Olive, but also added a little bit of Pacific Point, and some Early Espresso to give depth. I also added a little bit of Daffodil Delight toward the ends of the leaves to give variety. I tried to blend the colors together really well so that they didn't look blotchy.

And there you have it...my finished coloring of the flower image. What do you think?  Leave me a comment if you have any tips for me.

 To finish off the card, I "fussy-cut" the image out, along with die-cutting the largest label from "Lots of Labels" framelits dies using my Big Shot. I stamped the birthday greeting using Staz-On ink because the label is cut out of the heavy vellum (a card stock vellum) and Stampin' Up!'s classic ink would not dry quite as fast... I also glued a little bit of Dazzling Diamonds to the stigma part of the flower to give it a little bit of sparkle.

I love how this card turned out! I hope you do too!

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again soon!

Kathryn