Steps in a Process of Making Some Cards

Here is something I was just working on about a week ago . . .
There are two card designs, for Mother's day (for my mom and mother-in-law). I was frustrated with not having figured out something sooner, but I'll be able to send the digital picture to my mom, and give a printed version to my mother-in-law (and also send her a card, but it will get there later). I had prints made, to make cards out of, today-- and this was really an evolutionary process, so I thought you might be interested in seeing how it came about . . .

​Here is the original color pencil drawing: 

​And when I was editing the scanned image about a month ago, I hit a key accidentally which brought about a different, more "glowing" look to it:

So I saved this variation, and when looking for a picture I could use to make a mother's day card, I decided to try to do something with it. So first I selected the main section of the picture, as I wanted to use it to make a "bouquet"--

​Then I put this on a bluish background and added some stems, leaves, and other details-- (to make a"glowing bouquet")

​

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It took a long time . . . this was a project that just kept going on . . . and on . . . and on . . .
 Then after getting the image at right I saved it . . . and continued on, adding more and more stars . . . 

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​So after that, I wanted to try to create a sparkly/hazy effect, and found a brush in Photoshop that is used to create stars or other small speckles; to use it you have to repeatedly "stamp" with it all over the area you want it to be.  I used a light yellow, and also white, for this.

I think I put too many stars in . . .

​It looks OK from a distance, but it wasn't the look I wanted for a mother's day greeting. So decided to go back to the previous version, and thought, "I'll just print it out as an art print, instead of making a card . . ." and went to get 2 prints made.  In looking at the prints more closely, I decided to cut off the bottom part where the soil in the pot is . . . because the colors just looked kind of strange (maybe because of printing ink differences or just because the colors ARE kind of strange).
 
So then it looked odd to have all the short, chopped-off stem bits at the bottom of the bouquet, so I cut around the bottom flower edges, doing some experimental trimming with each print-- and the final shape for each bouquet turned out to be a little different.

Next I glued the cut-outs onto some nice paper, for cards (as seen at top of this post).
 
What's kind of funny is that in the finished cards the flowers turned out to be up-side-down from how they were originally drawn . . .  it just seemed like it looked better to have the haze (and straight cut line) at the bottom. 
 
 So the cards were finished, but I still wanted to send a digital picture to my mom . . . and so used the earlier design, but added some text--

So that is my long story about making cards and trying things out with images . . . 
I think sometime I want to try selecting out the main bouquet area of the too-much-stars design, just to see what that looks like by itself (it could be interesting to look at a group of very hazy/starry flowers).
 
It took a really long time to do this whole process of experimenting, but I had a good time working on it, so wasn't terribly upset with myself about staying up until midnight and not getting anything else done . . .