Floral Postcard

Say hello with this adorable papercraft. Send a Floral Postcard from Alyice Edrich to someone you love - it's a cheap and easy way to stay in touch.

Materials:

• Art sand
• Acrylic paint: blue, green, brown, yellow
• 11 x 8.5 sheet of cardstock or acrylic paper
• Pencil
• Paintbrush
• Golden GAC 100
• Scanner
• Digital photo software, like Paint Shop Pro
• Printer ink

Instructions:

1. Grab five basic colors of acrylic paint, some art sand, and an 11 x 8.5 sheet of paper.
    
2. Paint the background a nice shade of light brown and let dry.
    
3. Sketch three simple flowers onto the paper.
    
4. Fill the flowers in with a base coat of color: blue, green, brown, and yellow and let dry.
    
5. Grab some sand (the kind you buy at the craft store, not the kind you get at the beach) and sprinkle it around the painting.
    
6. Take a clean brush and dip it into Golden GAC 100. Lightly brush it over the sand. The brush will pick up some of the sand; just pat back into place and let dry.
    
7. Go over flowers with another coat of color.
    
8. Scan the image into your computer.
    
9. Play with the image in Paint Shop Pro until you get the desired effect. (I played with the contrast feature, added a picture frame, and then messed around with the texture effects.)
    
10. Resize the image to 5.6x4.25 (just the perfect size for a postcard) and use the unsharp mask.
     
11. In Paint Shop Pro, click on image, then resize. Next, unselect "lock aspect ratio" so that you can manipulate the size correctly. Then under "print size" insert the correct size.
     
12. Print the postcard on cardstock.