Silhouette Rose

Hi there everyone.  This is a card for a friend whose birthday I very nearly forgot so this was a bit last minute.  I used a stencil from a set I bought at The Range and which is having it's first outing, and used my Brushos with it.  This means I can enter my second card over at Darnell's Challenge where we have to use our NBUS, this means Never Before Used Schtuff, which I'm sure we all have ample supplies of.

I thought I would try the monoprint technique which involves inking up the stencil itself, spritzing it with water and laying over a piece of card so that in this particular instance the the rose shape would remain white whilst the rest would be inked.  I tried this using and Ultramarine colour Brusho powder and this rose stencil, and then spritzed it with water, but unfortunately as this is quite a thin stencil the ink crept under quite a bit and the image wasn't terribly clear.  I then did the same steps again after drying it, but it made it worse rather then better.  I then thought I would add some colour to the rose itself by shaking the Brushos through the stencil before spritzing, but it didn't look that great.  After drying it I turned the card over and the colours from the other side had bled throuth and given it quite a pretty look, so I thought this time I would just use the ink straight from the pad through the stencil to give it the look of a silhouette, using Memento Teal Zeal but I didn't like the finished colour, and adding water didn't improve it.

My last shot was to try using a  Black Micron Pen through the stencil.  Eureka! it looked better!  I decided to leave it at that and this is the finished look.  The black pen could have been smoother but with time running out I was not going to start again.

I hope you managed to follow all that without going to sleep....lol.  I cut this out using a Crealies Nesting Die XXL No. 44 with dots, and then I cut the blue layer using the same set of dies, the largest die.  I then dry embossed it using a Sheena Douglass Textures Embossing Folder Distress.

I finished the card by layering it up and cutting the white base card down to leave a small margin all the way round.  I then die cut the sentiment twice, once from white card and once from blue and both backed with Stick It adhesive.  I then layered the blue over the white and attached it to the card which helped it to stand out better from the background.

Thank you for taking a look today and I'll see you again soon.

I am entering the following challenges:

Darnell's NBUS Challenge No. 12 - Anything Goes with NBUS.  (The stencil is my NBUS item) 
Pixie's Crafty Workshop - Weeks 301/302 where we use up our snippets of paper and card etc.  (I have used snippets of white and blue card and a further small piece of blue for the sentiment)
Dies R Is Challenge No. 82 - Life's Events. 
Simon Says Wednesday Challenge - Anything Goes.
Seize the Birthday - Anything Goes Birthday.