Irises

Last Saturday wasn't a gloriously blue-sky sunny day, but it was nice enough for us to take a short trip to the Botanic Gardens - and we got back to the car park just as the rain started.

Here are some of the irises. They're a flower I love, we used have the big tall ones in the garden when I was a child, and for quite a number of years I had a tub full of small orchid irises  I had grown from seed - but in the end they stopped flowering and their pot cracked in the frost last winter so I threw them out and will start again some time.

So for my Art Neko card this week, no surprise that I chose to feature an iris, using a stamp from the Set of 9 Flowered ATCs.
I stamped and embossed it on watercolour paper and coloured it with Inktense pencils and distress re-inkers for the background. The layer behind it was done with watercolour pencils sanded over some watercolour paper which had a stencil laid over it and then I misted a small section at a time and sanded the pencils over it. I had thought a while back of giving away my older cheap watercolour pencils, but this is a technique I like for the soft granular textured look it gives, so I held onto them. The base was just coloured with distress ink and misted, then scored around the edges. Since the ATC image has a heavy black outline, I added black edges to my sanded watercolour panel and the base layer. Oh - and because I liked the look of the paper where there had been no stencil and it just caught all the sanded pencil, I used a strip of that along the bottom, just for fun.