garden bench

I love this Garden Bench image from Impression Obsession...it's sort of sentimental just by itself, and I thought it'd be a nice one to sit animals or Magnolia characters on, or whatever, when the mood strikes me.

I was almost ready to go to bed the other night when I got the idea to create a garden scene around the bench with the Wreaths and Garlands set. Couldn't go to sleep with that idea in my head, so I went to work on it and this is what resulted. The bench was stamped on watercolor paper, then masked. I misted the paper, then stamped the grass to fill in underneath, then the vines and flowers. I then removed the mask and stamped a few flowers over the bench image, where they grew in between. :) The flower centers are acrylic paint, dotted with a large embossing stylus. I added some shading with watercolor pencils, then a little more with a Prismacolor marker. The greeting is the last line of the saying "wishing you many warm & happy memories".

Those 2 background papers, the stripe and the creamish print.....funny thing.....you will see them on several cards of mine in the next few weeks. When I don't get my scraps stored away they sit in a pile on my desk and tend to keep getting used on cards as a self-challenge (let's see what I can make with just things on the top of my desk!). When I realized that almost all the cards I made in the last week were all rather cream and tan...I decided I needed to clean up a bit! Funny. OK, maybe only to me.