Do you save your practice and warm-up painting or drawing exercises? I am using mine as additions to my handmade valentines. Sometimes a project that we are working on does not end up quite as we expected. Rather than tossing it out, consider cutting up sections of it to use in other projects.
As I have noted in previous posts, I often use spray inks, water colors or acrylic paint to add color to the practice sheets.
The inked paper shown above was originally plain white paper with my ink stroke practice marks. I added various inks and glued it to a heart die cut.
The flower is one that ended up too small for the card I planned to add it to, but it is the perfect size for the heart die cut. Well, almost perfect, there is a little bit of space at the base so I added a paper doily scrap to fill it in.
I hope these examples give you ideas for using whatever supplies you already have to make your own handmade valentine cards. You can substitute magazine images for any of my painted ones. As you can see, I use a lot of scrap items in my makes.
Another fun idea if you have little artists is to use their drawings or artwork. Make it a group project. Leave a comment if you’d like additional ideas.
Have fun creating through recycling.
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I really like the idea of saving the old practice papers, as Im venturing into adding water color markers into my watercolor paintings and have quite a few “practice ” pieces.
What is the brown burlap looking material behind the bird one? Is it burlap, and how would you make it sturdy enough for a card?
The brown burlap material is a napkin that I placed behind the heart to photograph it so folks can see the contrast better than on a white background. If you have a heavy weight shopping bag you can use that for a card base. Or you can ink white card stock with a brown stamp pad. Also deli bags work well. you can cut it to size and glue it to your card front and then put your valentine on top.