Cupcake Inspirations Challenge 394-I love you

I get the opportunity to showcase

 STAMPlorations products

 for this week's Cupcake Inspirations Challenge 394

This color combo always makes  me think of the jokes we told as kids:

What is black, white and red all over... a newspaper. (read instead of red).

But joking aside this color combo makes for very elegant looking projects.

I made a card for this challenge. I started with a page from the 

STAMPlorations color book: COLOR BLOOMS.

 

The flowers are so fun to color. I took one of the sheets that has 4 quarters. I cut it so I had a 1/4 of the page. I took red markers and colored the flowers. Depending on how many layers of the watercolor/marker I put, the flowers ranged in shade and hue.

I

When I was done coloring the flowers, I cut the 1/4 in half again to make the panel on my card. I adhered it to a piece of black cardstock.

Now the flowers look pretty like they were just colored, but I wanted to add some texture to the centers. So I put generous puddles of Aleene's tacky glue to the centers.

I then took my heat gun and heated the glue until it burned.

 It left the centers with a lovely crunchy texture.

 (You have to make sure you only

 burn the glue not the paper, so move your heat gun frequently)

I could have left the centers crunchy and white

 but I wanted them to be dark, so I took acrylic paint and painted them.

 I experimented with some black and white designer paper

and embellishments. I had lace, sequins, a prima butterfly.

I also had put glitter with glue over the black on the flowers.

 There were things that I liked about what I had put together,

but there were elements that I just didn't like. I painted over 

the glitter. It just didn't look right. I liked the butterfly

 but it was just too yellowed so I painted it black.

 I kept the sequins and lace. I felt it needed a sentiment.

I stamped the sentiment from one of the new STAMPlorations sets

called: POCKET BLOOMS WITH CUTplorations POCKET DIE.

 

So here is the finished result. 

I really like how it turned out.

 

I hope that my card has inspired you and that you had fun reading how I made it.