Monday, May 20, 2019

Spring Greeting Card with Sennelier Watercolor


This sweet image by Dreamerland Crafts is a perfect Spring or Summer greeting card, with it's soft colors - complete with blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Sennelier L'aquarelle watercolor was used to paint the image. They are a dream to work with: easy to re-wet and so very pigmented. These paints are very high quality, with excellent lightfast ratings. Doodlebug Design papers, Karen Burniston die cuts, and some customized flowers add to this fairly simple card design.

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Making the Card

1. Cut a piece of Fabriano Artistico Extra White Hot Pressed watercolor paper to 4 1/4 x 6 inches or larger (I left extra wiggle room around my stamping).

Notes about the paper: I did not like how the paint stuck to some spots on the paper more than others when I used a wet-in-wet wash (sky); I would probably use a different brand for this type of work next time. If you look closely, you can see that the paint stuck to some fibers more than others, giving it a grainy texture - of course this is fine if you are going for that look. I didn't care for it. However, I do like the extra white color of the paper, as well as the smooth texture that makes stamping much easier than on textured watercolor paper.

2. Using a Stamp Platform and Nocturne VersaFine Clair ink, stamp Pleasant Fragrance (Dreamerland Crafts stamp) on the paper cut in step 1. You will need to trim the bunny stamp area from the girl stamp unless you want to mask or do selective inking.

3. Use Sennelier (or other) watercolors to color image. To create the sky, I used a wet-in-wet wash of blue, going from dark at the top, fading to nothing near the ground line. Then, while still wet, I used a tissue to blot areas for clouds, removing the blue so the white of the paper showed. For the grass, I put down a light green wash, then filled in the grass blades using a few different shades of green.

4. Once the image was dry, I used a black Copic Multiliner to fill in areas of grass to give it a more cohesive look with the stamping.


5. Die cut green cardstock with largest Crosshatch die with crosshatching. Die cut image using largest Crosshatch rectangle die without crosshatching. Adhere to green die cut.

6. Die cut 5 or 6 "hello" words from green cardstock using die from Word Set 6 - Summer. Glue these together one by one to form a thick stack.

7. Choose a couple flower embellishments for the bottom left on card. Optional: use the same watercolor as you did on the flowers in the stamped image to color a couple white flower embellishments so they match perfectly.

8. Cut white cardstock 7x10 inches; fold in half to form a 5x7 inch card base. Cut red cardstock 4 3/4 x 6 3/4 inches; adhere to card base.

9. Find the red striped and red polka dot papers from the Doodlebug Design Dot-Grid-Daisy-Stripe Rainbow Petite Prints 6x6 paper pad (note: I couldn't find the papers I used for a link; you may want to try Dot-Stripe instead). Cut two striped and one polka dot piece to 2 x 4 3/8 inches. Adhere to red cardstock as shown. Adhere matted image as shown.

10. Glue on flowers, hello, and enamel dots where shown.


Supplies
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