Hi friends! Happy Wednesday! Thanks for stopping by today! Please be sure to watch Yana‘s video to see how she made this gorgeous Christmas card and enjoy!

Hi everyone, this is Yana Smakula and I’m excited to bring you another episode from my by-monthly “Yippee For Yana” video series! Lately I have been enjoying playing with various coloring mediums and I’ve been feeling inspired to color more! So today I have a Dramatic Christmas card to share created using a mix of old and new products from Simon as well as colored pencils.

I started working on my project by stamping poinsettias from Simon Says Stamp Winter Flowers stamp set. The reason I picked this particular image and not something else is because this image is large and it is an outline image, so it is intended for coloring. There are a few details to it, but it’s not overly detailed, in other words the details of the image will not be in the way of my coloring. There are dashed lines that will make the coloring a bit more difficult, but they all a lot of beautiful details to this design. If you are attempting this kind of coloring for the first time I’d suggest you pick a simpler image with less details to it. Look for some leaves and start there, this is how I got started.

Next I covered the entire piece with Hero Arts Brass embossing powder. I usually like to use Gold or Antique Gold, but decided to switch things up a bit this time. I used my heat tool and melted the powder. I also stamped a few leaves next to all of my flowers. I used a no-masking technique by my friend Svitlana Shayevich (be sure to watch the video to learn the details).

Like I mentioned before, I used my Prismacolor pencils to color this card. I will be honest with you, do not expect to color a background of this size in 10 or 20 minutes. It will take you a good hour or more depending on how meticulous you’ll be.

I first colored leaves using Limepeel and Green Ochre colors. Coloring really has no special tricks to it. I simply start coloring the shape with a darker pencil – in this case I added a darker green where the leaves were coming from under the petals and added a lighter color at the tip of the leaves. I did overlap both colors and often, if I feel I need to, I can ether go over the dark coloring with a lighter pencil or vice versa depending if I want the color to look lighter or darker.

I do have to mention that when coloring with colored pencils a pencil sharpener is a must. Coloring with a sharp pencil is much easier and in a way is much more pleasant. Also, if your pencil is sharp it’ll be much easier to color next to the heat embossed lines and make sure you color over the entire section.

To color the flowers I used Light Aqua, Aquamarine and Cobalt Turquoise colors. I particularly like how various shades of green and blue look on black cardstock, I think the black of the background really helps these pencils come to life and they almost look velvety on the card.

Keep in mind that you can color on other colors of cardstock, for example white and kraft but also on unexpected colors such as say pink or red.

To create a sentiment for this project I used one of the new sentiment sets from Simon – the Stained Glass Greetings and heat embossed large “Joy” as well as “May Your Christmas Be Filled with”. There’s a set of coordinating dies available so I used a die to cut the joy out.

I also used same die to die-cut an identical Joy layer out of black double sided sticky fun foam from Scrapbook Adhesives to be able to pop to Joy die cut up. You can use regular foam tape or foam squares, but I really like to use this product for something like this. And the reason I picked black instead of white is simple – the background is black so using white foam adhesive would have made it too visible if looking at the card from the side. I foam mounted the Joy and next used foam adhesive to adhere the sentiment strip on top.

I hope you’ll give this a try. Have fun stamping!

WATCH THE VIDEO:

SUPPLIES:

Simon Says Clear Stamps WINTER… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamps And Dies STAINED… [ SSS ] Prismacolor 150 PREMIER COLORED… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp Pigment Ink Pad… [ SSS ] ScraPerfect PERFECT CRAFTING POUCH… [ SSS ] Hero Arts BRASS Embossing Powder PW115 [ SSS ] Precision Heat Embossing Tool Gun… [ SSS ] Spellbinders PLATINUM Die Cutting and… [ SSS ] Spellbinders TOOL ‘N ONE T-001 [ SSS ] Scor-Tape 1/8 Inch Crafting Tape [ SSS ] Neenah Classic Crest 110 LB SMOOTH… [ SSS ] Scrapbook Adhesives Crafty BLACK Foam… [ SSS ] Simon Says Stamp Card Stock 100#… [ SSS ]

Thanks for reading today, and thanks to Yana for being our guest!

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