Elegant Foiled Vellum Flower

For my Magic Marker Techniques class, I decided to try out a fun and slightly challenging technique: coloring on vellum with OLO markers. I love the soft, translucent effect that vellum gives, and pairing it with hot foiling made the card feel extra elegant.

The Foiled Focal Point

I started by foiling the Golden Days Hot Foil Plate using Aura Foil from Spellbinders on a piece of vellum. Since vellum is quite thin and can be tricky to foil, here’s a little tip:

✨ Place an extra piece of cardstock on top of the vellum when running it through your hot foil system. This gives more stability and results in a cleaner foiled image.

Coloring the Flower on Vellum

Once the flower was foiled, I flipped the vellum to the back side and colored it with OLO markers. Coloring from the back helps protect the foil from getting scratched or damaged.

I used at least three shades from the same color family for the petals:

• Started with the darkest shade, adding strokes from the base of the petals.
• Moved to the medium shade, layering more strokes for depth.
• Blended with the lightest shade, softening the transition.

  

  

Another neat trick: using the lightest marker again over the darker strokes helps lift some of the color, creating a beautiful textured look with more definition.

Framing the Vellum

Attaching vellum to a card base can be tricky since glue often shows through. To solve this, I decided to frame the vellum so I could hide the adhesive behind the frame.

I wanted my frame to match the aura foil on the flower, but since I didn’t have metallic cardstock, I made my own! Using my Solid Hot Foil Plate, I foiled a piece of cardstock with the same Aura foil and turned it into custom metallic paper.

With this, I die cut my frame using the Candlewick Rectangles die. To give it dimension, I cut the frame two more times from plain cardstock and stacked them together.

Assembling the Card

Once all the frames were glued together, I applied adhesive behind the stacked frame and carefully positioned it around the foiled flower on the vellum. This way, the frame and vellum became one piece.

Then, I added glue only where the frame was (so it stayed hidden) and adhered the whole piece onto my card base.

To finish off, I added a foiled sentiment, tying everything together with the same shiny, elegant look.

  

  

Final Thoughts

This technique combines the softness of vellum with the vibrancy of alcohol markers and the elegance of foiling. It does take some patience—especially with layering the markers and assembling the vellum—but the results are so worth it. The vellum gives the flower a delicate stained-glass effect that I absolutely love!

  

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