Blooming with Joy
Hi all! Thanks for joining me again! I wanted to show you this card and the work on it because even though I made a fairly crucial mistake, it still came out beautiful and vibrant.
A few weeks ago, I bought the Altenew Peony stamp and die set. I had been eyeing it for several months and they happened to have a 30% off deal so I had to get it!
Peonies are one of my favorite flowers (second to Dahlias), because they're just so flowy and soft. I love the set because of how large the peonies are and the ability to color or paint the petals.
For this card, I started with a 4x5.25 piece of Bristol smooth paper. I then used my Tim Holtz stamping platform to stamp the pink peony in the foreground. What I forgot (and is the MAJOR mistake) was that I used Black Memento Ink to stamp the flower. DOH! I should have remembered from one of my recent cards to not use it but apparently, I was not thinking. Please note, if you decide to watercolor something, DON'T do what I did and Memento Black ink. (unless you want the bleeding look like I got).
In order to place the flowers close to each other without stamping over the flowers I knew I was going to have to mask off the flower so I stamped the flower again but on 2 full sticky post-its. I fussy cut the flower out of the post-its and then masked off the flower in the foreground.
Then I arranged the peony stamp two more times around the pink peony. In order to arrange the peonies so it didn't look like they were all facing the same direction, I did some selective inking so that I didn't stamp the stem of the peony on one.
After stamping the three flowers I knew I wanted to have some foliage around them so I took the two masks and placed them on the outer flowers and then selectively inked up the petals from the stem of the peony stamp so it would look like two petals were coming out of either side of the bouquet.
Now it was watercolor time! I decided on my color pallet based on this week's Color Throwdown's Challenge #498: Peach, Pale Pink, Hot Pink and Green at colorthrowdown.blogspot.com. For the hot pink and peach peonies I used colors from my Arteza Real Brush pens. For the pale pink peony and the leaves, I used distress inks, Spun Sugar and Crushed Olive. I smooshed the distress ink pads on to my craft mat and wiggled my Arteza pens on there as well. Then went to the paper with a size 2 round brush.
I started with the hot pink peony and as soon as water touched the flower I knew I had made a mistake! The lines started running and the hot pink was a little more dull than I wanted and then I realized it's Memento for Copics, and Versafine for watercolor....oy! Then I remembered seeing Kathy Racoosin recently using Memento Ink to her advantage while watercoloring a beautiful flower and I figured "Well, might as well give it a shot!"
So I embraced the bleeding and at times tried to pull out the grey look in the flowers. I think it comes out most with the Spun Sugar flower and almost gives it a purple tinge in certain light.
Once I was finished water coloring, I decided to do some paint spattering with the left over colors on my craft mat. Lastly, before mounting the paper to a black A2 card base, I stamped the "Bloom with Joy" sentiment from that same Altenew Peony stamp set in Versamark ink.
Next time, I'll make sure to stamp with Versamark ink before I watercolor (or maybe I'll just go buy the Gina K Amalgam Ink, which I hear is amazing since you can use it for with both alcohol markers and watercoloring!) but, I can't complain because I still feel the card is beautiful with a slight touch of whimsy!
