Sunflower Thanks!!

Hey everyone!!  Happy Tuesday!
I can't believe the sun is shining today!  It was supposed to be gloomy all week here in Washington, so I'm so excited that the sun is out!  Gives us a chance to dry off a little bit and let all my flowers bloom!  I love this time of year with everything blooming.  My roses are just starting to pop open and they are so gorgeous!  How about you?

So today we have a fun new challenge starting at Tuesday Throwdown - Embossing!!  This can be powder, dry, or paste.  Doesn't matter!  I love to use embossing paste on my projects.  It has some really neat qualities to it..but I decided to just go with some regular heat embossing for my card.

Our awesome sponsor for this weeks challenge is Create A Smile Stamps!!!  I was so excited to get them added to our sponsor list this year!  Plus they provided us with a discount code so I also got to get my hands on some of their amazing stamps!!!  For my card today I've used the Magical Flowers stamp set.  I couldn't help myself...I'm a sucker for sunflowers and that large one right there in the center of my arrangement was calling my name :)

I started my card by white heat embossing a woodgrain stamp onto some Neenah Grey cardstock.  Then began layer stamping all of my flowers.  In order to get everything layered like this without all the bulk, you have to do some masking.

Masking is like magic!  But you have to remember that anything you want to be at the front needs to be stamped first.  So for this arrangement, that was the sunflower.  Once that was stamped, I made my mask and stamped the next flower that I wanted in the foreground of the arrangement but behind the sunflower, which was the super cute little flowers from the (retired) My Favorite Things Sweet Roses set.  I finished off the arrangement with a few little flower sprigs and leaves from the Winnie & Walter In Bloom: Addie's Garden set.

The flowers were then all colored in really quickly with my ShinHan markers.  I didn't focus much on depth or details with the markers because once they were all colored in, I went back over everything with my Spectrum Noir pencils and added the depth and details with those.  I love this technique!  I am horribly heavy handed and can never get nice little detailed coloring with my markers.  But the pencils have such a nice fine tip that I have more control and can easily get those details exactly where I want them.

To finish off the card, I white heat embossed a sentiment from the Winnie & Walter Big Bold & You set onto vellum and then trimmed around just the top portion of the sentiment.  That whole vellum piece was wrapped around my front panel and then I scattered some Sparkling Clear Sequins from Pretty Pink Posh around the card.

Do you love it?  Cuz I love it!!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Create A Smile Stamps Monthly LinkUp
    Simon Says Stamp-Flowers
    Word Art Wednesday #230-Anything Goes

Thank you so much for visiting!  Be sure to join us at Tuesday Throwdown for our Embossing challenge!!! <3