Holiday Cards - Day Three

Well I will fess up, I was not much of a fan of todays lessons. While I love watercolor and alcohol inks  I don't like messy type things especially my cards. But I wasn't going to be a party pooper and did my best. 

The first technique used gel pressing which I do not own nor have much interest in but I tried several things to make some sort of resemblance as best as I could. I took 1 stencil which I just purchased from Scrappy Boy at the Expo and used it two ways. 

For the first card I ended up laying down the stencil on top of cardstock then squeezed out various alcohol inks on my glass mat, added a generous amount of alcohol blending solution and allowed those to meld together then used a rag I blotted the inks onto some photo paper. I have learned alcohol inks are always the most vibrant when applied to glossy paper. I then cut my card down to my usual 4.25 by 5.5 card and wished I hadn't only because as you can see my diecut letter is a bit crowed on the card but I felt a large sentiment was needed here. Using some silver matte paper I added that layer onto several white cardstock layers then glued that down to the base purple background and again using a quick black sentiment from the Simon Says Stamps sentiment strips. I also diecut some pine branches from some pink glitter paper along with a few pink daisies. 

This next card was created using watercolors. Same stencil but this time using watercolor paper I sprayed it with water then used distress ink refills to drop various colors onto the paper then flooded the paper with more water which allowed me to dip the stencil onto the paper and inks and then transfer the watercolors onto a secondary water color piece of paper. A bit messy if you ask me. But sucking it up made a card. I did it twice and choose the better looking of the two, although the colors all seem to have faded into one. I kept this one simple just a sentiment, some more pre made strips and a few silver baubles. Not sure how I feel about this card. 

This last card is definitely my favorite, using up washy tape as a background is awesome, other than my tape was so old it stuck to the roll and shredded to pieces but I managed to find a few that worked. I added in some glitter snow as well as a foil sentiment and topped it all off with a few diecut sprigs.