The best cardstock for hot foiling is the smoothest. But you can make your own smooth cardstock in a few simple steps.

For this card I used the Hero Arts Love Bird & Friends Stamp & Die Set. It includes lots of cute critters and for today’s card I used the two lovebirds. What I love about this stamp and die set is the dies cut out the sentiments as well as the critters. I like the style of the sentiments too, with a seriff font and one or two words in cursive.

I’m foiling the background with the Hero Arts Twinkling Stars Hot Foil Plate, but first I’m watercoloring it.

Stamping

To get started, I stamped the two birds and a twig in Ranger Ink’s Archival Coffee. Archival ink is oil-based, so it’s great for watercoloring. I’m stamping on watercolor paper. But I was going to need two twigs, so I stamped everything one more time.

Painting the Birds

I used a size 2 brush for painting the birds and twigs.

As you can see from the photo above, lovebirds have red heads. At shoulder height the color changes to green by way of yellow. The tail feathers are blue. 

Here are the paints I used:

• Permanent Green for the green body and leaves

• Carmine Red for the head and beak

• Indian Yellow for the transition from red to green

• Cinereous Blue for the blue tail feathers and feet

• Raw Umber and Sepia for the twigs

• Prussian Blue and Sepia for shading

Die Cutting

When I was happy with the watercoloring, I die cut the birds and the twigs.

I also made duplicate die cuts from Accent Opaque for stability. That was particularly important because I was planning on popping up the birds and the sentiment with foam tape.

Watercoloring the Background

I used more watercolor paper for the background. My paper was a little bigger than the Pinkfresh Solid Hot Foil Plate. This paper is cold pressed, which means that it has some texture. The texture showed up beautifully when I watercolored the background with blue and green tones.

Here are the colors I used:

• Cerulean Blue

• Cinereous Blue

• Cobalt Turquoise

• Chrome Oxide Green

Foiling the Background

When the watercolor paper was dry, I used my Pinkfresh Solid Hot Foil Plate without foil to effectively create my own hot press paper. I put the plate, background and shims on the Glimmer machine and heated it twice. Then I ran it back and forth through my Spellbinders Platinum 6. This smoothed out the texture in the paper.

Then I was able to foil with good results. I cut the gorgeous holographic teal Moondust Glimmer Hot Foil and placed it on the plate. I put the smoothed background on top, added the shims and foiled as usual. You can see how little overfoiling I got. The tone on tone effect between the watercolor and foil is just beautiful!

Sentiment

The only thing that’s missing now is the sentiment. Because this card is part of a hop celebrating friendship, I chose the sentiment that says “our friendship is a melody that never ends.”

I knew I wanted to heat emboss the sentiment, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be green or silver. So I made two.

I stamped the sentiment with Versamark Embossing Ink and added Salvaged Patine Distress Embossing Glaze. Then I repeated the process with Ranger Super Fine Detail Silver Embossing Powder. 

I cut out both sentiments using my little white Sidekick. Then I had all the ingredients for the card, so I could pick a sentiment. In the end I felt that Salvaged Patina tied the scene together.

Assembly

I cut dow the background to 4” by 5.25” and lined it with Accent Opaque cardstock 120 lbs for stability. Then I adhered it to my card base.

I put thick foam tape on the back of the sentiment, medium height foam strips behind the right bird and low foam tape under the right bird. I like having a variety of heights on a card. But you could just pop everything up on the same height of foam tape, to simplify.

And that finishes today’s card.