Don't be fooled by the front of this card... it's all happening on the inside.

This is a card I designed about 10 years ago, but never completed. Earlier this week I came across the prototype and decided to give it another go. It took three attempts but that was because I kept getting  ink on my fingers and it transferred to the card. But I persevered and this was the final result.

 

I started out with a sheet of basic white card  cut to  5  7/8 th  x 8 1/4 inches for the back panel. 

The front panel was cut to  8 1/4  x 5 inches. 

I stamped the balloons on both panels and masked them off before doing the ink blending.  

There are three score lines on the front panel and one in the middle of the back panel. But I'll come back to that later.

Warning!!  Do NOT score before completing the blending. The ink collects on the score lines making them much darker and unsightly and any stamping over the score lines will be patchy.

I  used torn paper and a blending brush and an assortment of green inks along with so saffron ink for the fields and blueberry bushel for the sky. 

The stamp sets I used are retired S.U  sets called,  Lovely as a tree and Up up and away. I used my cloud stencil, which is basically cloud shapes cut into the edges of a page from a glossy mag and blended ink over the edge to form the clouds. 

The front panel (The bit that folds out) I stamped the first balloon as close to the top as possible and masked it off.  I cut in half diagonally across the long side but in a wavy/hilly way, cutting around the red balloon.  After blending in the fields and a little sky. You may notice in photos that the sky disappears  later... I decided I didn't need it, so cut some off, then decided to do the front panel again without the sky.                                                                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                   

 

The small trees are the single leaf stamp in the Lovely as a tree set.  

I began stamping the trees.  

Stamp the rest of the balloons  on the back panel and masked off before blending the sky.

  

With a the fine end of a dark brown stamp and write marker, I drew in branches  and thickened the leaf stem to turn it in to a trunk. I scribbled some shrubbery around the base of the trees to ground them.  Then coloured the leaves with Copic markers, a light  green at the top and dark green at the bottom and not forgetting to add some green on the shrubs.

The last thing to stamp were the trees in the foreground. 

On the front panel, I  scored a half  an inch in from each end to wrap around the back of the back panel and I scored a third line in the middle.

Score the centre of the back panel in the centre.

Fold the score lines and adhere the front to the back, by wrapping and gluing the the half inch flaps around the back of the back panel.

 I cut a 6x 4 1/8 th inch base  card in white and blended some clouds on the front to match the inside. Punched out a balloon  in white and coloured it. Confession Time... I did actually stamp the balloon on the front and then smudged it, hence the punched balloon. It was slightly bigger than the stamped one, so it covered my mistake well. Once all the blending and stamping was done I adhered the inside into the base card with Tombow mono glue.

 Push the front flap into the card to fit in a standard 6x4 envelope.