Stop and smell the roses

The roses in this case are napkins and they help bring my Garden of Dreams layout to life.

This double page features a lot of greens and browns.  I made this background knowing that one of the techniques that Terri Sproul highlighted in this lesson was using napkins to enhance the page.  But when I was done with the painted background I thought it was going to be too dark and too busy.  In the past, I would have scrapped the idea and made another but I really wanted to see where this would take me.  Before the paint could dry I added a sprinkling of gold Mica D'Lights so the page would have a very light sparkle.

I started my napkin collage with a tan and cream floral napkin to try and soften up some of the dark swirls.  Some of the pieces of this pattern and one of the large flowers were stamped with a handwriting image and allowed to dry before being decoupaged onto the page.  These were the napkins I chose.

After the tan floral, I added two of the large lilies and two roses.  A marble pattern was stamped in gold to add a little depth to the background.  I wanted more of a garden feel to the page and because of the dark background the napkins weren't as prominent as I'd hoped.  No problem!  I grabbed a stencil and some of my USArt Quest 101 Light and added some vines.  While the paste was still wet I sprinkled Mica Delights in ruby and green.

A green Bic Mark-It was used to highlight the vine and a red one was used to highlight the circles to match the mica used on each.  After that, I stamped bees in cream colored acrylic paint and dragonflies using a brown Faber-Castell Gelato.

Terri's original theme was "Dream Big" but it just didn't seem to fit my page so I changed the title to "Garden of Dreams".  I chose a font from my computer and printed it out to use as a guide for how to draw each letter.  The same Bic Mark-It that was used on the vine was used for the letters.  And voila!

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