Always Butterflies

As summer ends, autumn begins, where do all the butterflies go? They used to cover San Juan Capistrano, but I heard recently they have not been there as much. We have them here year-round. They always seem to come back in spring and summer on the mainland, so I feel there's Always Butterflies.

This is another card that started out CAS and quickly turned into another "Oh, no" and shabby here we come. I had also tried a new technique in the background that (click link for simpler tutorial as well as video ==>) Lydia at Splitcoaststampers  taught via tutorial today. She calls it Bokeh. I called mine a failure LOL because I could not find a new pencil with a round eraser near me. So I used the next similar thing: the broken chop sticks I keep in my craft box for when they come in handy, like today, to stand in for the pencil erasers, which they could not possibly live up to. The paint didn't look like round circles, but rather like splotched messes.

Create the background:

Color gelatos onto your stamp. Using an Aqua brush or any paint brush with water, thin and blend the color on your stamp. Stamp the image onto cardstock.

Next you create the bokeh dots around the shadow image. Take your gelato color (I used the same blue) and color a small area on an acrylic block. Add a touch of water to thin, then dip your pencil eraser in. Tap gently around your image, first close to the image so that the most color is deposited around the image, and as you tap farther away, the dots get fainter. Keep doing this until you get a 'dreamy' dotted background all around the image.

Now for the main, to-be-fussy-cut image: I am using a butterfly by the way. Color your image with the colors you would like. I used yellow, green, medium and darker blue. Use your aqua brush to blend the colors to a wet, creamy consistency, then stamp onto a fresh piece of cardstock. You can add Gelato color directly to your image if you want it to be more vibrant, using your finger to blend. Time to cut this out. It will be adhered over the shadow that you created earlier.

I didn't like my shadow image background. so I tore off the edges and added sponging with yellows, greens and blues by Memento. Then I sprayed it with Shimmer Pearls (I make it), scrunched it up, then took a heat tool to it so it cried crumpled. I added some Glitterata Gold ink to the edges. Background done.

It really lacked pizzazz. Enter Prisma Glitter {grin} - ahh, just the right thing to doctor this up. First I painted the butterfly with Mod Podge, and laid it in a small container of glitter, spooning it over and over until it was all covered. I used a heat tool and heated it from underneath to set the glitter, and adhered with strips of foam adhesive to the shadow/bokeh/crumpled background.

The rest is pretty self explanatory, but please ask questions if you have any. My dh exclaimed, "It's as big as a 747!!!" which drew me down, including the corners of my mouth, into a frown. I will definitely be practicing bokeh more once I find a new pencil eraser :D

Thank you for looking!