Coloring Negative Spaces on Cards + Video

Hello Pretty Pink Posh’ fans! This is Yana Smakula and I’m thrilled to be sharing a duo of cards featuring Anemones stamps & coordinating dies. 

Anemones come is several colors, white anemones are probably the most beautiful of all. While white seems a very easy color to work with, it’s actually the hardest one to color on paper, especially if everything else you have happening on your project is white. In this video I’ll show you how use can use a dark background to help these white flowers come to life with minimum effort and very quick coloring. 

Watch my video tutorial below to learn how I made this card. 

Watch the video above  I  Watch the video in HD on YouTube

I have 2 cards and 2 similar, yet different techniques – first one featuring a one layer layer card with masking and another one, in case you are not into masking, featuring die cutting and layering. 

One Layer Card – Coloring The Background with Copics 

To create my first project, Sending Happy Mail, I stamped anemones around the edges of a 4 1⁄4 x 5 1⁄2” white cardstock panel. Next, I created masks for flowers, masked them and stamped leaves in between the open spaces. I removed masks and ended up having a beautiful floral frame for my card. 

To color these, I used the following Copic Markers: 

● G94, YG63 and G21 to color leaves; 

● B99 and B21 to color flower centers; 

● W1 and B000 to add hints of shadows where the petals overlap and meet. 

Coloring white is very hard to do, this is something I am yet to master. Here you don’t have to be a pro at coloring white objects as we’ll add a blue background and our white images will come to life with very little effort and just minimal shading. 

Once my coloring was done I used B99 marker and colored the entire background. Think of this as coloring the negative space. It does take time to apply all of the color, especially next to the stamped images as you need to go slow and be patient, but it really does look phenomenal in the end. 

Once my background coloring was finished I left my panel to dry for about 10 minutes. Next, I white heat embossed a sentiment – Sending You Happy Mail from the Happy Mail stamp set. 

I adhered my background on to an A2 white top folding card base; to dress this card up I used metallic gold confetti and sparkling clear jewels. I couldn’t decide which of those embellishments I wanted to use, so I used both by first adhering the confetti piece and topping it with a jewel of the same size. 

Layered Card – Using Colored Cardstock 

Not everyone wants to use their Copic markers to color background around the images as that takes a ton of ink and that is also time consuming. Another way to go about this is to add your die cut images onto a background made out of colored cardstock. 

I stamped several images I wanted to use for my 2nd card and once again colored using same marker colors as before. Using the Anemones coordinating dies I cut these out in my die cutting machine. This gave me beautiful stamped, colored and die cuts pieces for my card. This also gave a white outline to each of my die cuts. Having a white outline can be very discarding for this project, so to eliminate it, I used a Copic marker once again and color matched white outline to my background color. 

So here instead of coloring the entire background, I’m replacing the marker colored background with colored cardstock and only coloring the white die cut outlines on my stamped images. 

This way your images and the background become one, they look as if they were done on the background directly and don’t have that white border that separates them from the base. This is not a trick that will work for every card design, or every image, but this is very fitting for these gorgeous white anemones. 

Have fun stamping!