Mom Life / Bella Blvd + How To Tips

Hey there, friends!  Happy Mother's Day :)  Today I wanted to share my newest layout for Bella Blvd.  I wrapped up our Pandas & Popsicles Week with a fun and festive layout about being a Mom.  This collection is lots of fun, and I decided to go all floral with it.  I chose the Picnic patterned paper as my background.  I knew I wanted to add lots of colorful flowers to it, so I used some white acrylic paint to fade out some of the design.  This is something pretty easy to do if you want to use a busy patterned paper.  The paint (or you could use gesso) gives you some white space to work with while still letting the pattern show through around your design.  I used a palette knife to smear the paint.

I used a flower cut file from Just Nick and cut several kinds of flowers using papers from the 6x8 Paper Pad.  After my paint was dry, I scattered them around the page to see how it would look.  I like to test things out before I ever glue anything down.  You can see how the white paint makes the flowers pop off the page and not get lost in the gingham background.

One of my favorite techniques is adding watercolor to my backgrounds.  I love using plastic packaging to smudge the paint all around the paper.  This is another fun thing to do if you don't want the brush stroke look on your layout.

Here is my finished layout.  I added pink, coral, blue and yellow spray inks to my background on top of the white paint.  You can see how lots of the blue and white gingham is still showing, yet all the flowers are jumping off the page.  This would look totally different without the white paint; the flowers would blend in more with the background design.  I didn't feel like the page needed a lot of embellishing since the flowers were such a bold statement.

I overlapped the flowers over the watercolor, and I love how that turned out.  I used a few of the Puffy Stickers beside my photos.  I love this vase of flowers!  I added a bit of pink tangled thread here for extra color and texture. 

I gave my photos some dimension by adding foam adhesive under them.  I also added part of a scalloped border sticker from the Fundamentals sheet under the pictures.  Here's another Puffy Sticker, too. 

I combined some of the alphas from the Fundamentals sheet with some of the Blueberry Wonky Puffy Alphas for my title.  I also added a few heart stickers.  That's a Punch Mix Puffy Heart and a small pink sticker from the Illustrated Faith You Are Loved Fundamentals sheet.  I love the dimension of these flowers!

I added in a fun Designer Clip here, but I just tucked it in as a layering piece.  A few of the smaller flowers are from the Paper Pieces pack.  That little banner sticker above the photo here is another You Are Loved sticker.

Here's one more close-up of all those die cut flowers.  The dimension is so cool with the edges curled up!  And I love how the watercolor peeks through all the open spaces.

I hope this inspires you to use a fun patterned paper as your background and maybe get a little messy with some paint!  Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful weekend!