How About a Prima Flower Tutorial?

I love my Prima flowers, and I'm always looking for fun new ways to use them.  Towards that end, I wanted to share some techniques I used to create this layout:

To create the background:

STEP ONE: Take a handful of Prima flowers (any kind, any shape, any size) and spread them across a piece of white cardstock.  I think it's important to go off the edge and not just keep them all in the center of the layout.

STEP TWO: Spray with a light color of Adirondack Color Wash.  The flowers are very light, so if you spray too close to them, the force of the mister will move them.  I recommend that you stand up to spray (getting far enough way so the force of the mister doesn't move them).

STEP THREE: Spray a darker color (I used purple) in just one location.  Keep the color a little dense here. 

STEP FOUR: Spatter the page with black watercolor droplets.  For nice big splats, use a large round brush.

STEP FIVE: Spray Red Glimmer Mist (I made my own following this recipe) across the left side.

STEP SIX: Remove the flowers and either let your background dry or dry it with a heat gun.

And now you have a beautiful custom background!  But we're not going to let those flowers go to waste!

STEP ONE: Mix up a puddle of gesso and water.

STEP TWO: Press the inked side of the flowers you used to mask your background into the pool of gesso.

When you flip the flower over, it will look like you just dipped it in milk.  Note the uneven application of gesso.

STEP THREE: Let it dry, or dry it with a heat gun and the flower will look like this:

You'll note that the gesso and the Adirondack Color Wash mix and create a sort of bleached look.  Here are all the flowers I used as masks after being dipped in the gesso/water mixture...

...and the reverse sides are very pretty too:

Though, obviously, the colors are brighter.  And once again, here's the layout all together:

And some details:

I placed a small pearl at the center of each flower.  I also dyed the rhinestones orange with alcohol ink.  Originally, they were pink.  I like the way the dying creates some uneven color across the rhinestones.

I hand cut the title from black cardstock, but it didn't show up enough, so I used a white pen to color the center of it.

P.S.: Check out my layout from yesterday's post on the Sassafras blog!

Thanks for stopping by!