Purple butterflies

Here's a little piece I made for this month's Berkhamsted Creative Challenge.

The theme is purple, which I thought would be easy, but it took me a while to come up with something to make.

I started by making a purple splodgy background, with ink in a plastic folder. I used dusty concord distress ink, then two purple felt tip pens, for variety of colour. Haven't done this for a while, so forgot how it goes and they ended up a bit blotchy, but fine for what I want today. I also used a plain white and a black card.

The butterfly is a stamp from Clarity, it came with a set and I hadn't used it before (still trying to use things I haven't played with before!). I stamped in versamark, then added three different purple embossing powders.

The two at the front of the photo are both violet pearl. This one looks completely different on white and black. On white it's iridescent and needs to catch the light - I didn't use this one. But I really want to try using it to do bubbles.

On the white card I stamped with a glitter powder. These two are both Wow powders.

Finally, on the background I'd made I used a white powder.

I trimmed all three down to the same size. I brushed some more dusty concord over the splodgy background, to give more contrast with the butterfly, and to change the colour a bit to be less pink and tie in with the other two better.The embossed lines resist the ink, it just wipes off them, so they stay nice and white.

I edged each piece with the same embossing powder (a versamark pen run along the edge gives a nice even line), then mounted on a piece of matching card. The splurgy one was still white, without the added ink, but I like the slight contrast.

To mount them all, I looked through a stash of printed patterned paper I found in a charity shop a while ago and bought for an absolute steal! I chose a purply one that I thought worked well, and cut it to size. I mounted the three toppers, on different levels of foam pads to stand out. I edged the background with a purple sharpie to finish it off. The final touch was some gems on the corners.

The repeated panels sort of remind me of Victorian naturalist drawings. These are a funky, purple take!