Pastels - what a challenge!

Well this was a real challenge for me - over at As You See It challenge they had a mood board as below and you had to use all of the items. It was only as I sat down to join in I realise how much I don't use pastels! 

I grabbed an old SU Set Choose Happiness which I don't think I've ever used much.  I've been going through all my old sets and sorting them in to keep or let go.  I'm now looking at these sets with a different eye - and if I can use them on my art journals or mixed media then they stay.  This was one of the stay ones - anything with birds on has to stay too lol!

And so my challenge began to find some pastel inks.  I stamped the main images in Versafine Clair Nocturne ink which is my favourite black ink.  I then used some Distress Inks and a water brush for my flowers - Victorian Velvet and Milled Lavender.  The leaves were stamped in Versafine Clair Shady Lane and coloured in with Distress Ink Twisted Citron.

I then used my favourite SU embossing folder Painted Texture to emboss the stamped image.  i went over it in parts with some SU Soft Pastels.  I found them in a drawer and haven't used them in a while.  I cut out some butterflies with an SU butterfly punch in the same colours and added some pearls.

The ribbon is old SU Powder Pink shimmer and I added the bird in Archival Distress Picked Raspberry which had been stamped off to make it paler.  The sentiment comes from another old SU set that's a keeper Feather Together.

I didn't have any pastel cardstock to layer it onto but did find this very pale patterned cardstock someone had gifted me which fit perfectly.