Watercolor - Happy Birthday

Continuing with my Ranunculus inspiration I used the Beautiful flowers stamp set from Simon Says Stamp to create this simple flower design. I first stamped the image in Squeezed lemon then used my pickled raspberry to paint the flowers and I really like using a two color so I added in some orange from my Kuretake Gansai Tambi paints and went back with their burgandy red color to add in more depth. Used more Distress Inks to paint the leaves and then all was left after the splatters was to add a sentiment and some enamel dots. Voila, instant watercolor card. 

Watercolor - Thanks so much

So my garden is starting to bloom and every day for about the past three weeks I have been looking at my flowers, love to see what's starting to bloom, what is blooming and just nice to see everything so green and happy.

In particluar I am loving my ranunculus. I thought I'd share a few photos of these beauties because they have been totally inspiring me to make a watercolor card.

So much pink goodness.

I love how the edges of this one are pink but the inside is a nice cream to faint yellow and was my inspiration for this card. Not that I did the flower any justice because it's tough to beat Mother Nature but I wanted to try and darker edge and lighter middle. 

The stamps were from Altenew and used Tim Holtz Distressed Inks. My die from MFTS was a bit too small for my overall image so I cut the leaf out then layed it on the outside of the die and diecut the panel as I normally do. A fun technique that allows you to keep your overall image.

Just Because

I don't know about you but where I live Spring is definitely abundant. I am getting very inspired by my flowers, be that said this panel was actually colored last year I just found it looking for something else so it needed to be mounted on to a card and given a sentiment.

The stamp is from Penny Black and it doesn't get used very much and last year one of my goals was to give my unloved stamps a chance to be showcased. I colored it with some copics and diecut it from another unloved product my non rectangle dies. This die is from Nestabilities and the sentiment is from another unloved die from Papertrey Ink. So there you have it 3 unloved products getting a bit of chance to shine.

I think next week I need to do a bit of watercoloring, my ranunculus flowers are jut too damn pretty to ignore. 

A few more layouts

Just wanted to share a few more layouts that I completed of my dgds.

And while I'm finishing up layouts I haven't have had the time to get to the journaling just yet, but I will plus these all need to go into albums.

Do you see those FUN stickers can you believe that's Lil Davis Designs, lol those I'm pretty sure are about 15 years old. The stitched thickers not quite as old. Did use a mix of washi tape, enamel dots, acrylic stars and then punched out some additional stars as well as circles to add to the embellishments.

For this page I primarily kept it simple using a scallop die and punch to cut the hearts then used enamel dots, washi tape and a couple of older stickers and cardstock embellishments.

And also have been working on some sewing. Made this fabric tote as my first bag that I plan to add to my etsy shop.

I just love this pretty pink flower design from Robert Kaufman and technically you could use this as a reversible tote as it is lined inside with the the same pocket design as the outside.

Changing it Up

I thought I would share with you today some of my layouts that I've been working on instead of cards.

But up first I just wanted to show you this fun bag I made. I made mine in a Mickey Mouse theme and then another one for my daughter in Harry Potter. They're based on those old school doctor bags.

And here are a couple of layouts of my dgds. I have a ton of layouts to do because I haven't done any for at least 1 maybe 2 years. And if you really want to test yourself see how many old products you can spy.

The Love words are those Thicker chipboard stickers as well as the Sweet cardboard letters. The paper I had to order believe it or not I had 0 girl paper. Pretty much a lot of things I had been hanging on to, feels so good to use up all that product.

Ok I confess this page uses all new products except I did use my Quickutz Nutmeg font. And since I was at the expo I lucked out and was able to get those puffy stickers half price...score!

I think I pretty much have a good 3 dozen layouts I am behind on and was able to get half 80% completed,  I say 80% because they all need titles and some a few more odds and ends but rest assured I won't share all of them.

Colorburst - Glossy Photo Paper (Long Post)

As promised I am giving you a little in depth look at colorburst on glossy photo stock. I already used it on matte stamping paper from Tim Holtz that is similar to photo paper just more matte than glossy and I should also say it has a nicer weight to it than matte photo paper. You can see examples of those backgrounds here and here. Note- If you just want to see the card skip to the end. 

I also have tried this powder on watercolor paper and I'm gonna say it isn't worth the bother unless you paint with it as I did here.

When I tried the watercolor paper the first thing I noticed is it just doesn't carry the vibrancy you think it would and I think the problem is you can't flood the paper enough to saturate the paper while diluting the powder enough to get that splashed background effect. It either fades in color or doesn't expand.

I wanted to show you how glossy this paper is and then took images without the the light reflection so you could better see each panel .

See the gloss that helps retain the vibrancy on this paper. When I first misted the paper with water after sprinkling on the powder I really expected it to ruin the paper but it didn't. There were no thin water areas or warped parts of this paper at all.

 

I was a little to heavy handed with the purple and after misting heavily with a water bottle you can see that purple just took over. The nice thing is you can sprinkle a bit of powder here mist it, let it dry then use another powder in a second area, mist it and you have a nice balance of color as seen on the panel below.

I will say if you saturate the paper fully it tends to puddle and like most watercolor papers will run, However having it puddle as I did in the panel below you can then use it as an ink and stamp with it. 

 Yep you can stamp with it albeit I didn't spend a lot of time finessing the right consistency of how watery your pool of color is but you can see it does work in a messy kind of way. I suspect if you tighten up how watery your pool is you can get cleaner images. I was just purely experimenting and some images are better than others but it can be done. I also stamped off excess and then stamped on my panel and had better luck.

Now you might be thinking I have too much of one color and want to add another color so you sprinkle powder on top of your existing color, this is where it fails because the product dries fairly quick it won't meld into the bottom color as shown below.  What you end up with are these grainy looking spots. Now I tried this with watercolor paper first and got the same effect that's why I started getting disappointed with this product, if I am using watercolor paper I expect to be able to keep adding color and blending it, you just can't with this stuff.  See those elongated dots well no matter how much water I applied they just wouldn't meld and end up sitting on top of the bottom color. 

Now my favorite part. I was using a splat mat and this powder does end up with remnants of powder here and there kind of like glitter and I found a bunch on my work surface so I did the very thing Tim Holtz does when you have excess ink on the mat, I spritzed it with water then pressed the panel into all that excess spots of color and went back a second time kind of swiping in the mess and this was my result below.

And you can see how glossy and vibrant it is with the light hitting it. 

Lastly using a card using the colored panel for my background and it looks amazing. This is a fun way to have a background other than watercolor which I find this much more easy to use or patterned paper or even stamps. In fact you could very well stamp on top of this but I love the pretty splashes of colors all melded together so I will let it showcase its vibrant colors on its own.

Altered Embroidery Hoop

I was going to discuss my Colorburst adventures but am running late today, baking bread, sewing purses and general odds and ends so I didn't get time to write up the blog post, but I did have this lovely hoop I created during my time at the Expo.

This adorable little girl is my youngest grand daughter and since girl projects are always fun to do with tons of flowers and pinks I adorned the hoop with lots of those elements. I did spritz the background paper and used a stencil but the spray was a gold glitter and it really doesn't show up here.

This was easy enough to do. I traced pp and chipboard using the outside edge of the hoop then after using double sided tape to attach the pp to the chipboard I hot glued it to the back of the hoop. From there I just kept adding lots and lots of floral elements.

I used some of Prima's art alchemy paint to paint the wooden love word as well as splatter some on the background.

This was a lot of fun to do so I might just have to make another one for my other grand daughter.

Happy Birthday - Colorburst

Here is another card made by using colorblast on a Tim Hotlts's Stamp paper and I was intrigued by this paper that I also played around with photo paper and will have a more in depth look at that for Wednesdays blog. I have to say the effect is quite amazing.

It really is quite fun to sprinkle this powder on a card panel and gently mist it with water to see the colors bloom and meld together. I wasn't happy with this product at first but I have really grown to love it.