Colorful Monstera Leaves with Dawn

Dawn’s joining us today with a fun and colorful project (as always!), inspired by her awesome garden and outdoor plants (also as always!). I love her use of color and I’m always a little envious of her abundant green thumb!…

After working with the new Large Leaves Monstera dies for the Urban Jungle release and adding some fun pink veins to my monstera, it got me to wondering if I could use the same dies to create some coleus and caladium inspired leaves!  It’s no surprise that I love coleus and caladium plants.  We grow many different varieties every year and have done so for at least a decade or so now.  I love them because they’re a fantastic way to have color in your flower pots all summer — including PINK — without relying on flowers which may not be continually blooming!  Another great advantage is that pests that can plague flowers, tend to leave coleus and caladium alone!  I share lots of our plants daily on Instagram, in case you want to see some of the plants that inspired my projects today!

So, one of the really cool things about coleus and caladium is allllll the different color variations there are.  And any one leaf may have 4 or 5 different colors on it!  Which makes it really fun when it comes to recreating some of your own paper versions!  The sky’s really the limit when it comes to colors!  I mean, of course you can use your imagination and create any fun color combos you can dream up.  But there are loads of really spectacular real-life versions to inspire you, if you want them to be a bit more realistic.  A quick google search may surprise you on how many colors exist in real life, and will surely give you tons of inspiration!

To create mine, I opted to have a little fun and let them be \loosely inspired by some of our actual plants and then played a bit with the colors I used.  I die cut the monstera leaves and veins in really fun colors and added some shading to the center portion of the leaf with some ink blending.  Then, I glued the leaf onto another piece of card stock and simply trimmed it out around the edges, not cutting into the gaps that make it a monstera.  Its super simple to do, but the results are so fun!

I just played making leaves first, not worrying about a specific card color combo.  Then, once I had my leaves made, I built some color combos around them.  I really wanted to use the same layout, but show you three distinctly different cards — one more realistic and neutral, one more dark and moody and one more bright and cheery! Each one features additional die cuts using the Large Leaves Fern and Palm dies, as well as a Little Labels sentiment and Woven Cane in the background.

I hope these cards give you loads of inspiration and help you to get even more mileage out of your monstera dies!!

Have a great weekend!
Dawn