Hollyhock Heaven Indeed!

This is the stamp I didn’t know I’d been waiting for until I saw it in the new Penny Black release! Hollyhocks are such beautiful flowers. I don’t have any in my garden so obviously I need some on my cards!

As usual I worked in the stamp positioner with hot pressed watercolour paper. I first inked the centres of the open flowers with a dark red zig clean color brush marker, spritzed with water and stamped. Next I inked the stems and leaves at the top of the image with a green zig marker and stamped. I used saltwater taffy distress ink to ink all the flowers wiping ink off where I could see there were leaves. This is a bit of a tricky step but a bit of green in the wrong place can usually be diluted and dabbed off with paper towel. I blended all the petals with a paintbrush pulling the dark red ink into the paler pink. When stamping the lower leaves with mowed lawn distress ink the fence ended up green so I went over that with some hickory smoke ink and a paintbrush. When I was sure the flower petals were dry I added yellow to the centres just like my reference photo. To finish I splattered some green and taffy ink, added a little greeting from the PB ‘how sweet!’ set and tied some twine to fit in with the little fence.

Isn’t this stamp a stunner? I can’t wait to try other colours and pair it with other florals.

Now back to my gel printing class; it’s not going to publish itself!

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