It’s spring! I finished my handmade Easter cards and now am planning our family celebration. We had a little bit of rain and the yard is greener. The lavender is starting to bloom and the gophers are awake.
As noted in my previous post, I am slowly using up the papers that I place under my projects to protect my table surface. It is an adventure to see how the random patterns will be as a card background. My example here has gesso, ink and acrylic paint covering it. You can see the patterns where I used stencils and masks on various projects.
This is like a paper drop cloth behind my projects, sometimes it would be nice to duplicate it. The blue area has folds where the paper stuck to my paint roller. I think I was cleaning off my brayer at the time.I cut two wide strips from the paper to use as the background papers for the cards. Fortunately I still have plenty left for another project.I stamped multiple verbiage samples on different color papers so I will have a variety to choose from.This is one of the sections of the paper that was caught in the brayer. I used a large rubber stamp to add a light pattern to the background. Actually, I prefer to have the stamped image show more, but this is how the ink resisted the acrylic paint on the background. I used paint markers to add the circles and the dots on the verbiage.The card on the left is another part of the brayer folded paper. I decorated the background the same way as the previous card. You can see that the ink shows up better on the verbiage topper that does not have any media on it.When I made the card on the left it seemed too dark so I added the yellow circles to lighten it. The stamped image shows up better on this card because it is on an inked background rather than the acrylic paint. The yellow card has paint marker circles and a thin washi tape border around the verbiage topper.
I hope this gives you ideas for techniques to use not only on your handmade Easter cards, but for any cards you are making.
Have fun experimenting with the supplies you have and be sure to save the papers you cover your work surface with. They make interesting and unique backgrounds.
Also, let me know how you get rid of gophers in your yard.
