Using my large rose stamp

I've had this large rose stamp from Rubber Stampede for almost a year now. I've used it a few times, but I've always tried watercolor pencils or just colored pencils, and I've never been totally pleased with the results.

So I challenged myself to find a productive use for it. I discovered that I like it much, much better when I color it with markers and give it a bolder look. I used a basic marker set for this, so I'll have to break out my Bic Mark-It set to get more pastel colors.

So let me show you a few things I discovered along the way ...

First of all, I was pretty pleased with how the coloring turned out, and I added some red glitter to accent it. (Gold glitter looks nice, too.) Then I mounted it onto matching red paper and laid it against my dark green card base (a full 8.5x11" sheet folded in half).





Nice, but a bit bland. (Okay, a lot!) So I broke out my new pack of large acrylic flourish stamps to see what I could do for that card base.



That's much better! And just so you know, I'm terrible about random placement. Everything I do has to be extremely planned out, even if it's supposed to look random. So here's a quick peek at how that card base looks without the oval decoration:



I goofed a little on the placement of the flourishes at the bottom, but as you can see from the previous picture, it didn't matter at all.

I still thought the card needed something more, so I added this ribbon bow:



That looks better! I'm actually pleased with this one!