Happy Valentine’s Day, friends! You may have been expecting roses here on the blog today, but I’m surprising you with a different flower that reminds me of love! It’s a little-known fact that many, many years ago the hydrangea was my wedding flower. Today’s project features Jen Shults’ gorgeous coloring on our Big Blooms – Hydrangea image and it strikes a particular chord with me because she captured exactly what my wedding bouquet was supposed to look like! Why do I say ‘supposed to’? Every bride has a meltdown moment, right? Well, maybe not every bride, but my meltdown moment came when my father-in-law returned from his assigned errand of picking up the bouquets for the bridal party. I eagerly opened the box to find that they had sprayed my hydrangea bouquet the wrong shade of purple! In hindsight, it would have been fine, but instead of going with the flow I began crying and decided in that moment that it was most important to send him back to the florist to see what they could do to fix it. Everything turned out fine – they were able to fix the bouquet – and now my mini-meltdown serves for a good chuckle years later!

So, back to the star of the show; Jen’s gorgeous hydrangea! I know many of you have a great collection of Copics and it’s often helpful to know which colors were used in order to achieve a similar look. So I asked Jen to share the colors she used and a few helpful hints.

My coloring style tends to be “fiddle with it until it looks right” and “use all the colors”. To save you the time fiddling, here’s what I used to get it just right!

I wish my own coloring looked good enough to be photographed that closely! When it comes to my own projects, everything looks better at a distance. *grin* After finishing the coloring, Jen used the new coordinating die to cut the flower and the leaves. And one of the best parts about the Big Blooms is that they’re BIG which means you don’t have to do a ton of thinking when it comes to your card layout!

And because one hydrangea is never enough, here’s a bonus look at a card that Noriko designed when the hydrangea was first released. Her gorgeous project doesn’t utilize the dies, but you can see how she used masking to create depth and dimension.

Thanks for stopping by today! I hope you all have a great day and make plans to stop back tomorrow for a video sharing another quick and simple set of Big Blooms notecards (this time using watercolor!).