AECP Level II-Beautiful Details

Hello!! Wow I have completed the last class of Level II, Beautiful Details, taught by the amazing Marika Rhatu. I have long been a fan of Marika’s unique style and technique but I never had the nerve to try it! Well, I had to do just that for this project. I worked the majority of today practicing and working on a few cards. This class was by far the most challenging for me. I was more focused on actually getting comfortable with the technique as opposed to coming up with a card design. I chose to try and replicate two of Marika’s cards.

I will start with the card I was most pleased with! I was dazed and amazed I actually pulled this off and really enjoyed it!! Here’s that card:

This sketchy floral with doodles was done with a leaf image from the Altenew Painted Rose set! Yes, leaves! I used gray and violet Zig markers on my stamps and did first and second generation stamping (second generation stamping just means that you ink up your stamp, stamp off on scrap paper and then stamp the second time on to your project producing a lighter image). Per the class tutorial, I doodled some lines to give the illusion of flower petals. I also added stamen and stems. Various leaves and even certain parts of an individual leaf served as buds and petals. And voila, I have flowers!

I hand wrote “you” to keep the card simple and a few splatters from the same violet zig marker completed the look. Here are a couple of other test images I did with the leaf stamps, I saw butterflies:

On to the second and third cards.

I used Altenew inks to stamp the images’ first three layers and Prismacolors for details. The sentiment on the coral image is from Painted Inspiration. On the purple flower I also used a purple Wink of Stella marker to add the darkest shadows and some sparkle, the sentiment comes from the Wild Hibiscus set. There is no question that practice, practice, practice is needed to master this technique. My hat’s off to Marika!!!!

What a great learning project! I hope I’ve inspired or intrigued you to try the above techniques, and if you aren’t following Marika, you are missing out!! Here is her Instagram page .
Thank you for stopping by! Michelle