rollin' rollin' rollin'

i've been catching up on my altered rolodex swaps for the junk journal junkies group at paper anthology. here are my two most recent sets:

july's prompt was "use a stencil" and luckily, i have quite a few of those! ;) in this case i chose my beloved donna downey poppies. since i was working on samples for an upcoming gel printing class this particular week, my background uses a couple of techniques i'd like to incorporate in the class, including a horizontal ombre blend and printing the stencil twice with slightly different paint colors to get a sort of shadow effect. 

to finish off the card bases, i added a bunch of grungy overstamping to the backgrounds of the cards. arguably too much, lol; i actually liked the cards better one step before the final version. but there's no crying in baseball and there's no "do-overs" on optional swap projects, so i just rolled with it. my sentiment is composed of diecut letters using impression obsession's typewriter lower case set on scraps of glossy white cardstock.

my top layer of poppies are diecuts, painted with colorburst, in a mixture of mostly fuchsia with a bit of marsala, to approximate the same shade as the quinacridone magenta acrylic paint i used on the gel prints. the stems are chartreuse with a tiny touch of terre verte. here's a great tip for watercoloring flimsy or tiny items, like my memory box "row of poppies" die, with it's skinny skinny flower stems. cut them from nice sturdy watercolor paper, then DON'T remove the excess paper until AFTER your flowers are dry! this gives you a much sturdier base on which to work and helps prevent some of the warping.

june's prompt was a color palette of sage green, pink and grey. i dusted off my alte new rose flurries die set and used up nearly all my red and pink cardstock scraps to assemble the layers and layers that make these flowers look so beautifully dimensional. 

my background is a literal patchwork of grey and silver patterned paper scraps cut into strips and pieced together in a sort of funky herringbone pattern. i did a post last year which explains the process in more detail and it is right here, should you need it. the only thing that's a tiny bit different with the rolos is that i assembled my herrings and then diecut the cards, since this saved a lot of tedious trimming up at the end.

i hope the weekend is treating you well and that you will be able to sneak in some creative time! ♥