Paper Blossoms: Coloring on Colored Cardstock

Hello stamping friends! Today I have some tips on how you can get more out of your outline images by coloring on colored cardstock. For my samples today I chose to use Copic markers but I think it would work well with colored pencils as well. By selecting a light colored cardstock to stamp and color on you have your highlight color already, even before you start coloring! Let me show you what I mean.

Outlined images that don't have a lot of detail are best for this technique as you will be using the colored cardstock as one of your colors. For my first card I pulled out Sun Ripened Pear from Inspired By Stamping and several green Copic markers. I stamped the pear in Memento ink and started coloring my leaves.

I started by using my lightest green and only coloring part of the leaf. Where I thought highlights might be I left just the cardstock uncolored. Over the top of the lightest green I layered a darker green and then my darkest green, again not covering anymore of the cardstock. To get them to all blend and soften edges I went over the whole leaf with my colorless blender. The cardstock will look wet but not to worry once it dries it will go back to the uncolored cardstock color.

I did these same steps for each leaf.

For the pear I did the same method but didn't leave as much of the cardstock color uncolored. It still affects your coloring though as the colors of the cardstock and markers do play off each other. I finished my pear with a gray outline to set it apart from the background. For my base panel I heat embossed the outlined pear image in white.

This technique also works great for flowers and butterflies which I used in my next card.

This time I used Australian Nature 1 and a light pink cardstock. I did the same method as described above for my butterfly and flowers.

See the initial hard edges you get on the left wing? After you add your second layer of color and then blend with the colorless blender they soften and you get a nice graduated color with the lightest color being your cardstock as with the wing on the right.

For the orchids I added yellow centers and then some gray shading which you can see on the left side but I hadn't done it yet to the right.

Finally I added a dark pink to the petals being careful again not to color the whole flower. You can see the hard edges on the lower left flower but how they soften out once the colorless blender is applied.