It can take a good amount of toil and laying around in poop to make a beautiful flower truly bloom. Obviously, the flower lays in the poop, not you.

This week’s Artist Trading Card celebrates the fruits of those labours.

Fancy a look?

FYI, just before I share, if you would like to see more from the ATC range that I have created, please feel free to raid the blog archive.

Now, as I mentioned, it takes a lot of hard work to grow a truly beautiful bloom. It’s kinda how I’ve been thinking lately. It’s a couple of years now since I stepped out on my own, holding back the black dawg and relying on my own abilities to pay the bills yet it’s only now that I am starting to see the fuller fruits of those labours.

The flower head is there, it will need more work to come to full bloom, however, the hard work is the poop in which this bloom has been building it’s strength – and my poop is apparently powerful stuff as it has kept that flower growing for all of that time, despite the odd bit of metaphorical weedkiller getting spritzed nearby.

Anyway, enough analogies, and enough about poop! On with the Artist Trading Card.

If you would like to know a little more about this project, here are a list of the supplies used and a quick step-by-step of the method.

Supplies

• Blank Artist Trading Card,
• Peony Stamp from Crafters Companion. If you want it with a matching die, check this one out.
• Black Archival Inkpad.
• Acrylic Block.
• Blendable pencils. I used Polychromos pencils from Faber-Castell.

Method

1. Stamp the flower using the black inkpad onto the blank ATC. I stamped off the edge to give some cool white space in the middle.
2. Colour in using your choice of pencils/colours. Blend in a consistent fashion, i.e. shade all towards or away from the centre of the flower.
3. Add sentiment.

Seriously, that was it. That’s why I love these little projects. They can be as much or as little as you like.

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Once again, something so small contains a whole bunch of metaphors and analogies – or it’s just pretty. Is it just because of the personal reason behind it or does it speak to you too?

What do you think? Would you have done anything differently?

Oh by the way, again, if you would like to see more from the ATC range that I have created, please feel free to raid the blog archive.

As always, if you have any questions or comments about this post then please feel free to use the comments section below.

I’ll see you again with another blog post very soon.

J :)