Green Butterfly Challenge

I needed something to kick start me card making again after Christmas, and what better than a butterfly card. The Butterfly Challenge this time is to include a Zero, and or use the colour Zucchini. Now I have never used the word Zucchini to describe a colour. If my memory is correct, zucchini in USA are what we in UK call courgettes which are usually pale and dark green stripes. Now I live in Spain I know them as callabacin and they are plain, very dark green. However the challenge remit was anywhere on the green-yellow spectrum, so I dug out my leaf green brusho inks which separate with water to give a lot of yellow too, and made a background with them on very wet watercolour paper.

I left it to dry completely and trimmed it to fit a 11x17 card. I wanted to try a technique that I saw on some blogs before Christmas, where you use a cutting die to dry and wet emboss an image. I used two Wild Rose Studio butterfly dies. I won't write all the technique out here as there is an excellent video that explains it better than I can, by Jennifer McGuire, which you can see HERE.

In her video, Jennifer used a 'wink of stella' pen to highlight the raised areas in the embossing, but when I tried this it reacted with the ink and left a whitish film on it. So I coloured over this as best I could, and then went over it all with a deep yellow Leonie Pujol glitter brush pen which worked a lot better. I used a gold pen to draw in bodies and antennae on the butterflies, and to draw a frame around the card. You can see the detail of this technique better in this close up of the smaller butterfly.

Then I took the narrow pieces I had trimmed from the background card and die cut tiny flowers from the yellow areas which I glued randomly on the background, and some butterflies and the sentiment from the greener pieces, using a Joanna Sheen Signature die. Many of my friends are approaching a 'significant age' so I placed a gold peel-off 70th between the words to comply with the challenge to use a zero.

Now I shall link this up with Mrs A's Butterfly Challenge #69: Z for Zero and Zucchini.