Watercolor

There's a new challenge in the Blogosphere. Another one, I KNOW! The new challenge is on Virginia Lu's blog, and it's called Virginia's View*.  She plans to give us an inspiration photo and a technique each month. Here's her first challenge photo, and the technique is water coloring:

Now, I'm not a big colorer in general, and I'm not in love with water coloring, but then I remembered an easy way to do it, so I jumped in and made this:

(Yeah, spots on my camera lens ... I'm not knowledgeable enough to do Bokeh on purpose.)

I smooshed three colors of Distress ink onto my craft mat, spritzed them with water, then laid a piece of water color paper into it. I picked it up and pushed parts of it back in again until I was happy with it, then dried it with my heat tool. Then I cut it in half to make two pieces and stamped the Hero Arts Starbursts image over both pieces, and put them onto black card stock.

I thought I'd emboss the sentiments in white, but when I used Versamark and white embossing powder, I had a lot of spots that didn't take enough of the white powder, so I went back to an old technique I used back in my early days of stamping: If you want a really vivid embossed sentiment, use the same color ink as embossing powder. Back in the day, it was mostly Encore gold ink + gold EP, but today it was Unicorn White ink + white EP. It came out much better!

Here's the second card:

Different part of the water colored paper, a different sentiment, and different stray flecks of white EP. ;/  I noticed there was some shimmer on the water colored panel, which meant I didn't get all the Perfect Pearl spray off of my craft mat the last time I used it. So, for my last act, I added some Wink of Stella over the starbursts, then added some metal bling to the flowers' centers.

It's difficult to see in the photos because of my lack of photography skills, but the black layer is lined up against the fold of the card so there's only a white border on three of the four sides.

This is a very easy water color technique for those of us who don't water color much. Thanks, Virginia, for coaxing me play with inks and water, and thanks to my fellow ABNH teammate, Michelle Lupton, for mentioning the new challenge!

I'm off to play some more! Thanks for stopping by!

PS: My card follows the current CAS(E) This Sketch!:

Edited to add: There is now a separate challenge blog called Virginia's View Challenge! Time to update the Feedly feed! :)

Products used: SU water color paper, and the following:

InLinkz.com