Happy February! I’m enjoying all things Valentine at the moment and pulled out a delightful rose image from Wendy Vecchi and Stampers Anonymous to work with for a Valentine tag. I’ll share a few of my steps here, and you will see that this came together quite simply.

I began by stamping the rose image from the Stampers Anonymous SCS175, “Rosy Art” set by Wendy Vecchi Studio 490 onto plain white cardstock. This set has a really cute picnic basket and nice sentiments as well, but I decided to use just the flowers for the real estate I had to work with on the tag I’d chosen.

The really cool thing about this stamp set (and a number of others designed by Wendy) is that it comes with stencils! So you can add color to areas of your image easily while blocking out other areas. This set also has a mask that can be used to cover the roses, which means you can add color to the leaves without giving your flowers an inadvertent green cast!

I used Ranger Archival inks in Rosey Posey (appropriate!) and Red Geranium to blend color onto the roses with blender brushes. Post-it Notes are kind of requirement for me, which covered the open areas of the stencil if I got overly zealous with my blending. I didn’t photograph it, but I moved onto the leaves after this and used Fern Green and Prickly Pear Archival inks to color all of the leaves, also using the stencil. I filled in the area between flowers with Copic markers (E01 and E02) so it wasn’t stark white.

I had a tag in my stash that had a background already done using Red Geranium Archival ink and alcohol. I try to do a number of backgrounds at once, so I can just grab one when I’m ready to make a card or tag. If you’d like to know more about this background technique, Wendy Vecchi has a number of tutorials and wonderful classes that cover it and I highly recommend you check them out if you haven’t. With the color down, I stamped the Stampers Anonymous Vintage Tapestry background stamp onto it, also with Red Geranium for a bit of tone-on-tone. I then blended Acorn Archival onto the edges to give a more aged, vintage look.

I placed the trimmed out, colored rose image onto a chipboard wreath (Ranger Ink Chippies: Wreathes) for some dimension. Here you can see that I applied Acorn archival ink to the wreath to pick up on the aged look of the tag. To finish the tag, I doodled a white border onto the tag with a white gel pen, hoping to visually pull it together since the flowers have a white border. I popped up the roses and wreath on the tag with foam tape and also popped up sentiment (from Everyday Sentiment Strips by Hero Arts).

And there you have the finished tag. Please let me know if you have any questions. As you most likely know, you can also find me on Instagram and Facebook @penguiinpapers

To learn more techniques by Wendy Vecchi, join her Facebook group: INK…STAMP & MAKE ART with Wendy Vecchi and follow her on Instagram @wendyvecchi . She adds new content frequently.