Using dark card stock offers a great opportunity to highlight many different techniques. For today’s project, I’m using the beautifully textured Royal Sundance Midnight Blue card stock as a backdrop for a birthday greeting.

This is a rich navy with a slight cross-hatch texture to it. To bring that texture out, I started off by blending some Hero Arts white dye ink onto a rectangular panel using a cloud mask from My Favorite Things. The dye ink works better instead of a pigment ink because it sinks into the paper allowing the navy blue to still show through.

I wanted my hot air balloons to really contrast nicely against the dark cardstock, so I used a color wheel to help me find the perfect split complementary colors to go with the blue. I colored my balloons with a variety of Copics, then trimmed them out. The balloons and sentiment are from a Fiskars stamp set called Up in the Air.

After trimming down my navy panel, I heat embossed a sentiment from the stamp set, then added it to a white Cougar Folded Note Card flush with the upper right corner. I used foam tape to give it some dimension.

I overlapped the balloons, popping those up with foam tape and added those to the panel.

I love how the colors look crisp and clean against the navy card stock. Having a bit of white card peaking through keeps it light and bright. Thanks so much for joining me today and be sure to head over to the CutCardstock shop to see all the colors of Royal Sundance.