The first in this group features an imperfect watercolor technique—if you have any water-based dye ink pads, all you need is a non-porous surface for a palette, a paintbrush and water to begin painting! After allowing the image to dry completely, you can die cut it, and set it off with additional die cut elements like this Essential 4 Bar Rectangle. The great thing about the Essentials series of shape dies, is that each size has a separate skinny frame!

Instead of cementing everything down, just anchor certain portions of the flowers and the frame(s); this will create the illusion of additional depth even tho the design is relatively “flat”.

This second design lets you off the hook for coloring—make a colorful, striped background using a brayer. Use it like you would patterned paper by cutting what you need; the rest can be used on future projects. Instead of die cutting the tulips, use a straight blade trimmer to trim off a portion of the panel then fussy cut around the part that will over-hang.

For super crisp and modern color-blocking, grab card stock. This is great for using up scraps! Make sure the edges are cut very straight so you can butt the edges tightly together when mounting to typing paper. I used 3 colors and didn’t really measure because odd numbers are more visually appealing; if you use even numbers, you may want a greater variety in the depth/height of each of your pieces for better visual balance.

If your color-blocked panel ends up being narrower than expected, go ahead and trim your base card accordingly. This card’s final measurements were 4 x 5 1/2”, just a little narrower than the standard A-2 card. Trust me, the card police are not gonna bust you for not adhering to the A-2 standard. •wink•

Heads’ up: There’s a lovely sale going on at Ellen Hutson’s shop this weekend—click on the image below to go directly to this sale page!

Thanks for stopping by today and I wish all you mama’s out there a wonderful Mother’s Day!

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Disclosure: Yup, those are affiliate links to the products used in my projects and I make a small commission when you purchase via those links, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for buying all the things!