A Barn Birthday Card Using Stampin' Blends Markers

Hey everyone, I’m so excited about today’s project! I’ve been using our awesome Stampin’ Blends alcohol markers for a while, but I haven’t shared much about them on my blog. Today’s the big day! Last month I needed to make a birthday card for my dad, who has lived on a farm his entire life. It was only natural that I pulled out the Heartland stamp set and chose to make him a barn birthday card. I stamped the barn image and then colored it with the Blends markers. I love how it turned out!

I would like to start by saying that I know almost nothing about coloring with alcohol markers. That’s right…I haven’t watched days worth of YouTube videos, not even hours worth really. Someday I will, but for now I’m a novice coloring with some awesome markers, and the results were pretty darn good I must say.

I’m going to walk you through how I got this look. First, I stamped the barn image onto thick white cardstock using Memento black ink. It’s a good idea to use thick cardstock with the alcohol markers since you will be doing a lot of coloring and blending. You don’t want to wear a hole in your paper!

I began coloring the barn with the Dark Calypso Coral marker.

Next I added both light and dark Cherry Cobbler. The way I blend is by adding light color first, next adding a darker color next to the light color, then going back with the lighter color to blend the two together. In this picture I still needed to blend using the lighter markers.

I used light and dark Smoky Slate on the barn roof and silo.

Next I used some bronze on the windmill and ground.

Then some light Old Olive on the ground and trees.

Next for some dark Old Olive.

After the image was colored, I wanted to finish the edges. I started by adding light and dark Crumb Cake around the bottom. As I mentioned above, I always add the light color first, then add dark, then get the light marker back out and blend the two together. That is what I did with the Crumb Cake at the bottom.

Moving on to the sky, I colored light Pool Party above the scene.

Then I added dark Pool Party and light Night of Navy. When I added the Navy as shown in the photo below, I thought, “Oh, crap. I just ruined this.” I didn’t think I would ever get it to blend with the Pool Party. I had to try though, so I got out the dark Pool Party marker and went to town, blending, blending, blending…

…and I ended up with this! I love the effect it created!

Here is the completed card. I embossed the card with the Pinewood Planks embossing folder and used a piece of Crumb Cake designer paper from the Tranquil Textures pack to mount the barn.