Love & Laughter

This is my second card for Merry Monday's "The Magic Number is 5" challenge. I used one of the tree stamps (at least, I assume they're meant to be trees) from Hero Arts' "Joy to the World" set. (I stamped it 5 times total to create my star.)

I began by cutting a piece of Strathmore Smooth Bristol paper to 5x5". I drew a vertical line to mark the center of that panel, and another line perpendicular to that, 2" from the top. I centered my "tree" stamp with the point on the vertical line & the base on the horizontal line, and stamped with Versafine Onyx Black ink. I stamped twice more on either side, lining up the side of the triangle with my horizontal line. Finally, I added the bottom 2 sections to my star, by lining up one bottom point of the stamp with the vertical line & the other bottom point with each of the triangles I'd just stamped. Finally, I sprinkled on some Recollections Clear Detail embossing powder, and heat set that. I used a greeting from the same stamp set, stamping it with Versafine in the center of my star, and heat embossing it with clear powder. Then I erased my pencil lines.

To color my star, I used Carmine Red & Light Carmine Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers. I started at the broad end of each triangle section with the Carmine, and went out about 1/3 of the way. I used the Light Carmine to blend that out and add some lighter color, and finally used a damp paintbrush with just water to fade the pink out to the end. I repeated that for all 5 triangles, and also used the same procedure to color the center.

I added some Red Gold Gansai Tambi Starry Colors watercolor around the perimeter of my star, using a damp brush to feather out the color as it went away from the edges of the star. Finally, I matted that panel with gold mirror cardstock, adhered that to a 5.5" square piece of red cardstock, and mounted that to my 5.5" square white card base.

I'm also entering this in a2z Scrapbooking's February Challenge: "Any Shade of Red."