Card Exchange - birthday cards with mixed media book page backgrounds, flower and stamped greetings

Being inspired by some videos that I have watched lately I decided to give a try using book pages and acrylic paints in a watercolour fashion.  Totally fun!!!!!!!  I picked two sheets from a large dictionary and then marked in pencil the boundaries of where I would trim them down for my two large black cards which I created to fit in large envelopes from my stash.  I dug through a bin of acrylic paints which was mostly small little containers like those for "paint by numbers" which I have accumulated over the years.  I discovered that several were completely dried up.  It was good to do a bit of vetting in that bin.  I started with two different large butterfly stamps (left - Magenta  right - Sugarloaf) which I have not used in quite a while.  I stamped them in black (Versafine) and embossed them with black embossing powder which I thought would resist quite nicely the paint.  I used a very watered down gray paint to highlight the area around the butterflies which softened the printed words.  I watered down my paints significantly to colour my butterflies which allowed the print from the page to show through and watered them yet some more to paint my background in a very random fashion.  I did tried to wipe off the black lines of my butterflies before the paints dried but in some places where the paint dried on the embossed lines the paint was hard to remove later.  I was being very careful because these pages are very thin and I did not want to make holes anywhere.  Once I finished painting the background and the butterflies I let the pages dry completely.  Next I added some black lines using a fine tip Sharpie marker.  I did two squiggly lines all the way around and then some scripty looking ones in the center area around the butterflies.  The lines are really loose and only simulate hand writing.  Like how that worked out.  I felt I needed to anchor the butterflies in some way and decided to add a black line from top to bottom to accomplish that.  I used a wide tip Sharpie and a ruler and ran the line so it appears to be behind the butterflies.  I really like how that worked out.  Next, I worked on adding greetings.  I found two flower punchies in my stash.  They are punched from a cream and black scrapbook paper with very a vintage looking pattern.  Worked well with my backgrounds.  I watercoloured them a bit to soften their contrast, added black flower punchies and attached them together with a copper brad which echoes the copper paint I used on the butterflies and which I spattered on the backgrounds.  I softened the black flowers with doodles made with a copperish looking gel pen.  I found the greetings in my stash and decided to highlight them with blue so they would draw out that colour from my butterflies.  I cut them assymetrically and ran my pattern tracing wheel on all four sides.  I adhered my backgrounds to my black card fronts, added the flowers using 3D foam tape and then tucked the greetings under them.  It was so much fun and I love the look.  It was good to get some sorting done in that bin as well and I will surely be using acrylics to colour images again.  I have often used my leftover acrylic paint to make backgrounds and did so again this time around.  I save all my papers and paper towels so I can reuse them.  I used napkins and paper towels coloured in this fashion to create my heart art for support of the front line workers and the heart art I made for my Mom. These cards are for my partners in my Card Exchange for the month of March.  They are on their way!!  Therese