Creative Birthday Card Using BetterPress Techniques and Colored Pencils

I try to participate in Kristina Werner’s Mail Call each month. She has a different theme or technique spotlighted for each month. April’s theme was Birthday Cards.

Note: In some of the photos, there appears to be some areas that are not filled with color. This is because the colored pencils have a “waxy” core that bounces the light back and makes it appear there is missing color. I think it just depended on the angle I used when taking my photographs.

For my card, I decided on a BetterPress plate from Spellbinders. Instead of using the matching stencils, I decided to use my Polychromo pencils to color in the images.

I did not remember to take photos of my process for this card as it is pretty simple.

Instead of using a thicker paper as I normally would, I cut a piece of Canon Mi-Teintes paper that I normally use with colored pencils.
I first inked up the BetterPress plate and ran it through my die cutting machine using the BetterPress system.
I inked up the plate a second time and ran it through my die cutting machine a second time to get a really black image as this is textured paper.
Once I had my image, I started coloring my image.
I started out with a very light coloring of the images adding the shading where I felt it should be.
I then added a second layer of color making sure to overlap the colors but still using a very light hand.
My third layer of color filled of the images. (When you color on textured paper, you are gradually filling in the texture with color with each layer.)
A final layer of color filled in the remaining texture.
For my sentiment, I decided to blend the greens on a piece of the same textured paper and then die cut my sentiment from it. I wasn’t sure if this would work, but was happy with the results.
I die cut the shadow for the sentiment from some vellum paper and added my sentiment to the top.
I used a trick I learned from Jennifer McGuire and cut two additional word dies from white paper and added them to the back of the vellum lining them up with the die cut on the front.
I added my sentiment to the front of my colored panel.
To add some more interest, I added some soft violet pearls to the larger black dots that are part of the design of the BetterPress plate. I added some very small white pearls to the smaller black dots.