"Slate" cards

After reading the Garden Slate Panel post on the Paperartsy blog, I wanted to try something similar. Don't have any slate, not really into home decor... I considered covering some card with black gesso, but then I realized I actually have some black card in my stash. After getting started I made three cards, each for different challenges but using the same technique: heat embossing in white, colour with opaque Fresco Finish paints, glitter with Wink of Stella and Stickles and gloss with Crackle accents.

My first experiment involved the same stamps and colours as in the Garden Slate Panel post. I'm posting this card for the Paperartsy challenge (Flowers) and the Craft Barn challenge (Diamonds). I used Smurf as an opaque layer and Southern Skies on top of it to colour the diamond shaped petals.

My second card uses Chocolate Baroque stamps and follows the CB colour challenge (tan, yellow, green, purple). My array of paints is a bit limited, so I used colour pencils on top of the acrylic paints.

Actually it first looked like this, but I felt the multicolour was too restless, and covered the yellow on the left flower and the purple on the right flower with Snowflake and swapped the colours.

I had added dots of purple Sharpie to the purple parts. And despite the opaque paint layers on top, the Crackle accents activated it so that there are orange dots on the butterfly and the yellow flower.

My last card is for the Designs by Ryn August customer challenge. There seems to be some problem with the link, so I'll add this when it starts to work. I used the same blues as for the first card and some Paynes Grey on the moth and leaves, and for the flowers I used Dolly mix as an opaque layer (doesn't really show), and Bougainvilla, a pearlescent pink and Quinadicrone red to add interest.

Colouring in between the lines was mostly quite slow, the first card has fairly small areas to colour and comparing to it the stripes on these hibiscus flowers seemed endless! I mounted each on colour cardstock, they fit perfectly on 5x7 card bases.