How shall I colour thee? Let me count the ways!

Here's a card. And before you scroll down to see how I made it, here's a question. How many different types of colouring media do you think I used on it?

 The answer is just one! I've been having a play with my Be Creative alcohol based markers, and I wanted to see if I could create a card using only those to colour all the various elements. Of course, I had to use a water based ink to stamp the flowers and sentiment otherwise they would have been smudged by the markers, but everything is coloured with the markers.

I stamped the flowers (Honey Doo Crafts) with black Brilliance ink on to heat resistant acetate, embossed them with clear embossing powder and cut them out. I coloured them by attaching a piece of felt to a Be Creative mini ink blending tool, rubbing ink from the markers on to the felt, and then dabbing it on to the flowers.

To make the main background paper, I scribbled some colours on to my glass mat, added a few drops of hand sanitiser and smooshed it around with my finger to swirl the colours together. Then I pressed a piece of shiny card (eg. encaustic art card) over it to transfer the colour. An added bonus, (depending on the brand of sanitiser!) is that your card will smell nice!

The next job was to make the background for the sentiment. Again, I used the glass mat method, but instead of the hand sanitiser I sprayed the colours lightly with isopropyl alcohol to merge them, which gave a smoother result. Alcohol ink blending solution would work well, but I didn't have any, and anyway, isopropyl alcohol is much cheaper. You can buy it from the chemist, but they may have to order it for you, and you may be required to explain to them what you want it for!

SAFETY NOTE! If using either the hand sanitiser or alcohol spray methods, make sure your work area is well ventilated and do not use near naked flames. Also please note I cannot be held responsible for any problem resulting from your use of my methods.

For the outer border and that around the sentiment I simply coloured a piece of ordinary white card with a marker.The ribbon was coloured in the same way using two complimentary colours. Finally I used a marker to colour the self adhesive pearl (Be Creative), stamped the sentiment (Woodware) with Memento ink and diecut it with Spellbinders Label 4 dies.

I hope my experiment shows the versatility of the Be Creative Alcohol Markers, and also that you don't need lots of fancy stash to create something beautiful!