BONSAI CARD

(Boat Pop-up/ Piano Keys Pop-up)

In honor of Suzanne’s ongoing fabulous trip in Japan, today’s card will focus on Japanese culture and icons. Also, my YouTube was rotating through Karen’s tutorials marathon as usual…and it got to the tutorial in which she showed how she would remake the same card with different colors or sentiments. So I wanted to see if I could revisit one of my past cards, well, I tried to. I decided on the “It” card where I used the Boat pop, embedded with the twist mechanism, and turned it into a paper folded boat. I took that basic idea and turned it into a bonsai tree, with the boat base as the container and the tree turning. And I got to fulfill a goal I’ve had for months, which was to use the Boat pop along with the Piano Keys pop. I doubled the Piano pop and put them back to back as a floating floor to become the wood frame for the bonsai.

What was important to me was that I continue to work on improving my skills. For some reason I’ve been obsessed with buying different kits of alcohol and watercolor markers. So I was intent on coloring this goldfish on the cover. I practiced over and over again coloring this goldfish using Copics, Olo, Tombow, Chameleon, Karin Pro, Kuretake Zig kits…trying to learn by watching YouTube tutorials. I’m pretty sure I ended up using the Karin brush maker pro one.

Besides the bonsai, cherry blossom and goldfish, I also wanted to imitate the art of kintsugi (which literally means joined by gold). It is a lesson to not disguise or cover up the broken parts, but instead make it into and look at it as something beautiful. This enlightened thought has led to countless ceramic bowls or pottery featuring the iconic gold patched crack lines. So for this, I inked up some patterned paper then covered it with a mixture of translucent glossy gel mixed with crackle powder. Then I drew several cracked lines using an embossing pen and heat embossed it with gold colored powder. I think the effect worked pretty well.

Then I looked at my pile of unused stamps and ink and decided to play with them too. For the inside of the card, I inked up random parts of a cling stamp using black, blending out the edges. Then I inked the entire stamp using Lisa Horton’s Cloud 9 interference ink. This ink glimmers in different colors depending on whether the base is white or black. So this allowed tints of both colors to shine under the lights.

Last, I decided to make a pair of bonsai shears to put beside it for scale. I realized without some sort of reference next to the bonsai, it could look just like a big tree sitting in a boat lol….

Karen sets used in this card:

1005 - Tree Pop

1277 - Boat pop

1274 - Piano Keys Pop

1098 - Photo Collage Pop

1014 - Halloween Scene