Meet our June Guest Designer – Dina Kowal!

Wow, is June already here? Schools out, summer is in! And to top that with even more good news, here’s our fantastic guest designer for the month – Dina Kowal!

And here’s a little bit about her:
Hi, I’m Dina Kowal – I’m so happy to be sharing with you this month! I’ve been around the stamping industry for a good long while as a designer, blogger, rubber stamp illustrator, and Artist in Residence at Splitcoaststampers. If art ADD is a thing, I have it – my brain thrives on a constant rotation of all my creative interests: card making, stamp design, commissioned portraits and colored pencil art, jewelry and bead making, polymer clay, painting, gel printing and more. I’m a wife and mom of 4 (ages 15-20). I also love photography, musicals, and shopping for vintage stamps and artisan beads. I’m a proud introvert and a rural Missouri homebody.

And here’s her first post for us!

Hellooo! So happy to be sharing my first guest post for SugarPea Designs today! I’ve got a mixed media project for you – this dramatic Floral Envie image called for all kinds of layers and textures!

I started off with a layer of watercolor (these paints are QoR watercolors by Golden, and they’re my go-to!), beginning with the shadow around and inside the envelope and then adding color to the leaves, flowers, and butterflies in a light wash.

I’ve been using my color wheel more lately, so I used it here for my color combination – the yellow and green-gold shade are at the top, and I used the smaller triangle guide in the center to choose a split complementary combination, pulling in the red-violet and blue-violet as accent colors.

I layered with more watercolor and then the colored pencils above, plus a darker brown to deepen shadows and add detail to the stems and butterflies. The small white dots were done with a white Posca paint pen, and then I added a little more dimension using Bearly Art glue – it dries raised with a sort of matte finish, and really holds these lines nicely. Here it is still wet:

…and here you can see how it looks when dried.

I embossed the sentiment in white on black cardstock, and shaped the little banner so it curves up at the end. The stitching and petite scallop on the die cut edge is just perfect! That is from the Card Front Element Builder set, which has some sweet edge dies as well.

Floral Envie clear set
Card Front Element Builder die set

We can’t wait to see what she comes up with next week! Stay tuned!