Beautiful World Tour - National Flowers

Welcome to the August Beautiful World Tour, brought to you by Flourishes! Each month the team presents a themed blog hop, hosted by our group of international designers... we are literally spread out all over the globe!  At the heart of our projects is the idea of truly showcasing beauty in card making – whether it just be in a beautifully colored image, a fabulous way to incorporate an embellishment or a new twist on a card layout.

 If you just happened on the blog hop today because you're a regular reader of my blog, and you'd like to view the entire hop, you can start back at the Flourishes Blog - you'll find a full list of participants there, and all the details you need. If you're already hopping and you arrived here from Iwona's blog, you're doing just fine.

This month we've been challenged to choose a floral image that would be found in our country! Orchids are the obvious answer here... mine is blooming again, too!

I had great intentions of including a sped-up coloring video with my post, but some of the segments came out with a terrible glare, and since the camera is above my head, I didn't realize that there were a few moments where my panel was a bit off screen... so... I'm sorry about that! I need to work out some glitches with my camera and lighting before I try that again... it always seems to go awry when I do pencil videos. Here are a few snapshots of the piece while I was coloring, though!

I colored the Catteleya orchid image using Polychromos pencils. The image was stamped in a light green ink so that the lines would fade as I colored. I love this effect, as it makes the piece look like a drawing rather than a stamped image!

The background panel was sort of a happy accident - I actually had chosen the colors for my pencils based on some scraps of paper I had put together as a base, but after the coloring was done, the papers didn't 'work.' I found this piece in my stencil bin, already painted and already diecut with the same oval, and it matched! I love the rustic brush strokes.

The sentiment I used is from the Spring Bouquet set, and the buttons are from etsy - they're "threaded" with a thin strip of paper cut from the background panel.

Leave comments for all our designers and you could WIN A FREE FLOURISHES STAMP SET!! Comments will be accepted until the end of the month, and a random comment will be chosen by one of our designers - but we're not telling which one! The more comments you leave, the better your chance of winning will be.

From here you'll be traveling on to.........

 Thanks for hopping with us today! Don't forget to leave a comment!