Do dragonflies dream of Neon?

Don’t you love fresh, new ink pads?  They are full of new possibilities.  These IMAGINE Craft / Tsukineko Radiant Neon ink pads come in a bright rainbow of colors and they are fun!  Altered Pages is partnering with this wonderful company in June.  I was playing around with these colors and wanted to see how they looked on black paper.  Most inks soak into the black and are difficult to see.  I sponged a little yellow on the scrap and an idea was born. 

Using a card-sized panel of plain white cardstock, I tore V-shaped area out of the bottom to act like a template.  Then I sponged in layers of Electric Yellow, Electric Orange and Electric blue in an arc pattern.  A spiral foam stamp from my collection was used to stamp the sun and more Electric Yellow was sponged in to it  to make it a solid shape.  A Q-Tip was used to draw in the sun's rays.  After removing the paper template, I sponged some Electric Purple around the bottom edges to mimic the ground.  Then I heat set the panel.  I was going for the look of a sunrise in the mountains.

I chose to work with the Altered Pages Muse Dragonfly stamp set.  I love this set of stamps!  The dragonflies come in several different sizes.  The small cluster of dragonflies was stamped with IMAGINE Craft / Tsukineko Memento Tuxedo Black and more of the black ink was sponged very lightly around the edges of the card.  I tried stamping the words “Dragonfly Dreams” in Electric Purple but the stamp wasn’t wet enough and did didn’t show up as well as I wanted.  So, plan B…I re-inked the stamp with IMAGINE Craft / Tsukineko Delicata Silvery Shimmer used my stamp positioner to re-stamp the words.  And the whole thing was again heat set.

On a scrap of the same black paper, I stamped the largest dragonfly a couple of times.  He’s very detailed and I wanted to be sure to get all of the pattern on his wings.  These were heat set, fussy cut and set aside until the last step.

To highlight how the Radiant Neon inks colored the black paper, I mounted the panel on a slightly larger piece of the same paper using double sided adhesive.  It took several tries to find the right card stock to accent the pale colors without washing them out.  In the end, I chose a sky blue piece from my collection.  The two panels were mounted on the blue base.  To add the large dragonflies, I used Nori Paste along their head and body and attached their wing tips with foam squares cut down to fit.

It's a very soft, romantic card.

Quick and easy to make and I love the muted color I was able to achieve from these wonderfully bright inks.  Now I need to go experiment on white paper!  Until next time, Happy Crafting!



I was surprised how dark the inks appear on the scanner!!