Here Comes the Sun

March 27, 2023

Hello crafty friends! Hope you had a wonderful weekend! It was cold, windy and a bit snowy here in Colorado. I am so ready for Spring and warmer weather as I am sure everyone is.

I have a bright and cheerful card today featuring a new Dare 2B Artzy stamp called Here Comes the Sun.

This stamp features some wonderful options for creating “sunny” cards with a beautiful Sun and its rays as well as some flowers and a cloud. The set is also jam-packed with sentiments. There are 11 sentiment stamps that you can mix and match. It is the perfect set to use with all of your scene building cards.

For my card, I started by ink blending a panel I cut from a mini-slimline background that I cut from some watercolor paper. I had not intended to use this panel for my card as I was just going to experiment with a layout, but halfway through creating the panel I realized that I really liked it and did not want to have to re-do the whole thing.

To start, I blended some clouds on the entire background. At the top I used Tumbled Glass and Lost Shadow to ink blend the clouds. I kept the Lost Shadow on the right and the Tumbled Glass to the left to try to give the appearance of a grey, cloudy sky off in the distance.

Next, I used the Sunburst stencil from Dare 2B Artzy to blend on some sun rays from the upper left corner of the card. This gave me the appearance of the sun peeking through the clouds.

Once I finished ink blending, I stamped the upper left corner with the fun sun rays from the Here Comes the Sun stamp set as well as the little smiley face. Then I stamped the solid circle with Dare 2B Artzy Sunset Yellow with a bit of Bright Pumpkin ink blended around the outer edge with a small fingertip blending brush. This keeps the center of the stamp light and creates a darker edge.

I stamped the You Are My and the My Only onto the panel with Dare 2B Artzy Totally Black Ink. For the Sunshine stamp I once again mixed the Bright Pumpkin and the Sunshine Yellow to create a blended two-toned effect for the main sentiment.

Once my images were stamped and my Sunshine sentiment was stamped, I went in with some Macaron Pastel Colored pencils and smoothed out the stamping with some colored pencil coloring. If I had used something other than the watercolor paper, I wouldn’t have needed this step.

I die cut the Sunshine sentiments from the panel and then die cut 6 additional layers cut from varying shades of yellow to orange to layer and add dimension to main focal sentiments. I love the look of the multicolored layers when you look at them sideways. Such a fun element!

Finally, I stamped the two music notes with a dark blue ink and then went over them with a blue glittery marker to add a bit of sparkle.

For the inside of my card, I stamped the sentiment, “You make me happy when skys are grey” along with the little sun outline. I stamped the same smiley face on the inside.

I colored in the sun with my Macaron colored pencils again.

To assemble my card, I cut the slimline stamped and ink blended panel down using the largest layer from the Mini-Slim Layers Die set. The blended panel was cut down to 3 x 4 ½ and added to a layer of Pearled Gold Vellum from Tonic Studios which was popped up and layered on top of the colorful strips from the back of the Crazy Daisy paper from Dare 2B Artzy. My Crazy Daisy paper was cut using the largest Rectangle Framelets Die set. Everything was added to a top folding A2 size card cut from 110lb Neenah Solar White cardstock.

That wraps up my card for today. I hope you will check out the Dare 2B Artzy Here Comes the Sun stamp set. It is the perfect set to send some sunny greetings to your friends and family.