STAMPtember O Christmas Tree Background

*This post contains affiliate links to Simon Says Stamp

I've finally gotten through sharing all my new stamps/dies/stencils from the STAMPtember release!  You're likely to see those products again soon (maybe tomorrow), but today I'm showing off this O Christmas Tree Background from the release. 

As soon as I saw the background, I knew I wanted to do some tone on tone coloring and embossing in gold.  I've done this before, and I love this technique because it's such an easy way to get a really big impact.  

I started by stamping the background on both a red and green piece of cardstock.  Since you are going to emboss over top of the initial stamping, you can really use any color ink, but I tend to use a darker shade of the cardstock color.

Then it's just a matter of coloring in some of the details.  I used Copics, R39 for the red and YG67 for the green.

I did the red card first and tried to color it more delicately - every other for some of those teeny tiny areas.  For the green, I decided that the gold embossing would look just as good against the dark, so I picked some of those detail areas where there are little gold dots or squiggly lines, and I think it makes them pop a bit more.

The sentiments are both from the CZ Design Ornamental Christmas set.  

For my mats, I didn't have the 'perfect' shade of cardstock, so I just used the same Copics I used to color the images in to darken the edges of the cardstock mats.

Two more cards for my Christmas card stack!