Positively Negative Tulips

Possibly the weirdest title EVER, lol! But it's fairly descriptive, because today I've made a card that uses the negative space that's left when we cut out Hero Arts' Tulip Frame Cuts and layer the Tulip-shaped hole above some fun zen doodle designs. Needless to say, all of my supplies came from The Ink Pad, a place that I cannot wait to go back to in real life, whenever it is safe for us all to be released into the wild.

This idea would work with any die (or punch, or hand cut window!) but the main point is that we need to think about TWO distinct layers. First, we'll make the top layer. I used my Picket Fence Studio Blender Brushes to blend (from the top down) Mermaid Lagoon, Cracked Pistachio and Squeezed Lemonade Distress Oxides on a piece of Canson Watercolor Paper. When my panel was finished, I taped both Tulip Frame Cut Dies to the lower left side of the panel and cut them out. I put the actual diecuts aside to use on a future project, and kept the panel which is now a vague landscape with a blue sky, green grass (to which I added some detail with a green brush pen) and two tulip-shaped holes.

The bottom layer is going to be the "interior" of the tulips, it's the way we color them in. From plain cardstock I made a second, "scrap paper" version of the top layer, and used it like a stencil to fill in with Squeezed Lemonade and Shabby Shutters Distress Oxides in the correct places to work as flowers and leaves. Then I removed the stencil and widened out the areas of color a little more.

Finally, the fun part: filling in the zen doodle patterns. You could go wild with lots of different lines and swirls, but to make it easy to see (and explain!) I used a black .005 Pigma Micron Pen to put arcs within the flowers and an openwork plaid for the leaves. When I was finished, the panels looked like this:

I added a machine stitched border, a sentiment (from Hero Arts' Bookcase Peek-a-Boo Stamp Set) and an Eyelet Outlet Mini Ladybug Brad to the top layer, and mounted it over the bottom layer using foam tape. The I matted the whole thing on another panel of blended Oxides (this time Dried Marigold and Scattered Straw) and finally attached it to a glossy black A2 card.

Just think how many DIFFERENT versions of this card you could create, just by changing the blends of ink on each panel, and selecting different dies. The possibilities are nearly endless!