The Beauty of Nature

I love working with embellishments based on nature - all the beautiful flowers, leaves and flourishes that tie in so well with photos taken in natural settings - and you can bet I work hard to make sure 

the majority of our photos are taken with lovely green backgrounds! lol 

At home I hustle everyone out to the back balcony for photos and make sure they have lush leafy backgrounds ... even at the beach I'm careful to make sure not every picture has the rolling 

waves in them - I love scrapping those photos of course, but it can become an issue when every second layout in your album is nautical themed 😂

To compensate I make sure I always grab a few photos like the one below - still containing that beautiful beachy windswept, sunsoaked look, but with green backgrounds I can compliment with 

lovely nature themed embellishments ...

The base of this layout relatively plain so I added to it by using this beautiful stencil ... all it took was an inking sponge and some blue ink.

 

I added the stencil pattern to the background paper, 

but then I also added it over my matt to tie all the layers together.

Next I turned my attention to embellishing - these gum leaves chipboard sets that scrapmatts create are just divine. The just the right sized leaves and gum nuts for adding to pages and I think I would stick on everything if I thought I would get away with it!💚

I used simple metallic pens to colour these chipboards as the ink goes on so rich and thick 

and leaves a bit of shimmer on the final product.

The gum nuts tucked nicely in with the paper embellishments on this layout.

And of course - one always needs a title ...

This fun and funky title was perfect as it was - finished with white mist - I simply 

placed this straight on the page once I finished embellishing.

And of course I finished the whole page off by scattering a generous amount of these 

gorgeous acrylic gems around the layout

 

This next layout has much the same feel, but this time I used a stencil to bring in most of the 

leafy natural atmosphere.

 

Using muted metallic pens to colour my chipboards is defiantly a favourite technique of mine and here it is again ... subtly adding colour to these reedy embellishments that suit my 'by the lake' photos so perfectly.

For the leafy stencil I made sure to use a couple of shades of green so that they would have a somewhat 2D look to them rather than just a flat single colour stencil effect.

And for the titles I simply coloured them with the metallic pens as well.

And thats it from me this month, 

Thanks heaps for popping by to take look. 

If you have any suggestions for techniques you would like to see more of, 

please just drop me a note in the comments section below.

Cheers.