Sympathy card with Altenew Oriental Orchid

It’s always sad to have to make a sympathy card. This is the first one that I’ve made since I’ve started making my own cards again and, I must admit, I found it difficult.

I had searched for inspiration on Pinterest but struggled a bit to find many sympathy cards. I suppose it’s not something that people want to post about that often. I hope that this post will be helpful for others who need ideas for a sympathy card.

For my card, I decided to use the Altenew Oriental Orchid stamp set.

I stamped the orchids onto watercolour card with Versamark ink, and heat embossed them with white embossing powder. I had to mask the flowers as I went, so I could stamp flowers slightly behind others. I used full sticky post-it notes to do this, first stamping the image on the post-it note, then fussy cutting them out.

Once all the flowers were stamped and heat embossed, I masked them all and stamped and heat embossed the stem so it would go behind the flowers. I added some flower buds and a leaf too.

I thought a soft watercolour look would be nice to colour in the orchid. I used distress inks in spun sugar and picked raspberries for the flowers, and bundled sage for the stem and leaf. I added clean water to the images, then dotted the distress ink colours with a small paintbrush on to the images where the colour would be strongest. The water does the work of spreading the colour out and the embossing keeps the colour within the images. I slowly built up the colour until I was happy, and then let it dry naturally.

To add some colour to the background, I softly blended distress inks in spun sugar and victorian velvet at the bottom of the watercolour piece, blending about 1/3 of the way up the card.

For the sentiment, I used a stamp from the Clearly Besotted Many Messages stamp set. I heat embossed it with silver embossing powder.

I cut down the watercolour card to fit on the front of an A6 card, with a border showing. I attached it to the card with double sided tape.

I chose not to add any embellishments, as I thought the simple clean look was more appropriate this time.

I’m entering this card in the following competition:

• Altenew March Challenge