You may wonder about my choice of just flowers for today’s page spread.

Why?

A week ago, the 4th of April, it snowed in Rhode Island.  By that evening there was 8″ of the stuff in my backyard, covering the Daylily shoots that began poking up through the earth a couple of weeks ago.  Covering anything that remotely resembled the beginning of spring.

On Tuesday we began pressing Virginia England’s new Funky Flower stamps and I knew I wanted to film a video to introduce them.  Doing so required that I color some of them (or, as it happened, all of them) and they were spread out all over my workbench after I finished filming.  Since they were as close as I was going to get to seeing flowers (there was still snow in the yard), I figured I would enjoy working with them for this week’s page spread.  They brightened up my week and now that the snow is gone at last, there is hope that my Daylilies and other perennials will actually bloom!

This spread begins with all of the flowers colored.  I used various colors of inks and sprays loaded into Tim’s Detail Water Brushes.  Since they were set, I needed to design a background that worked with, and didn’t compete, with them.  I really wanted them to be the focus, so decided to leave the background plain.  Well, plain except for the border.  I’m a big on page borders…

So I drew a simple one cell checkerboard wit a PITT Pen and then sketched framed areas for each of the 9 Funky Flowers.

Pencil first, then I used a PITT Pen to finalize the frames.

And because plain is just not my thing, I had to add some circles and lines to embellish them.

And because I love Gelly Roll Metallic Pens, I used one to color in circles in the main border and the smaller ones in the frames.  They’ll be more evident in the next few photos.  The background was looking a little uneven and bare, so out came the PITT Pen again and I added…

Circles which I think unified the whole thing.

If you look carefully you’ll see that I used a white Sharpie Water Based Paint Pen to fill in the circles.  Once I was satisfied, I glued the Funky Flowers in place and called it done.  I love the flowers and because they’re embellished with Stickles, I really love them!