Easy Watercolour Backgrounds

Watercolouring in card making is everywhere at the moment, so I dug out my set of Reeves Water Soluble Wax Pastels to have a go at creating some simple watercolour style backgrounds.  I simply scribbled pastels in similar shades onto a white card blank in vertical, horizontal and diagonal stripes, then used a wet paintbrush to go over the colours and blend them a little.

Hello Greetings Card - ombre watercolour background

Have a Beautiful Day greetings card - watercolour background with glitter blutterfly

I used ordinary cardstock for these so the colours did not move as much as if I had used watercolour card, but I quite like that effect.  The first butterfly was cut using Sizzix Thinlits die set Butterfly #3.  The second used an ArtC stencil with BoBunny glitter pastes.  It's much more lovely in real life.

I like the simplicity of these.  The watercolour effect is a great backdrop that doesn't really need much else to make an attractive card.  This would be a great technique for making men's cards; a bold sentiment and a well-chosen stamped image or die cut would be all you'd need.

Bold Florals - Just For You Card

I had some flowers left over from my paper flower pot project, which didn't really suit that display, but a single one as a statement embellishment on the front of a card looks pretty good.

Bold Floral Just For You Card

The background was made with a scoreboard that came free with a copy of Crafts Beautiful magazine.  It is quite similar to the Xcut Quilting embossing folder which is a favourite of mine.  I used Sizzix Embosslits heart and leaf dies for the flower petals and leaves.  The flower centre was created by colouring a thin rectangular strip of card on both sides, then snipping into it at regular intervals along its length and rolling it up and fanning out the cut fringes. I found a sentiment that matched the colour of the flower and also used a similar colour for the card base.  A few gold gems helped to add some interest and also complemented the gold foiling on the sentiment.

Geometric Shards

A little while ago I was helping my mum to clean out her garage and I came across a load of my old school books and folders.  One of the things that I used to love to do was to decorate the insides of the folders by sectioning the space into squares or triangles and then colouring them in.  I made this card shortly afterwards, inspired by that memory.

How are You? geometric pattern card

I used Spectrum Noir alcohol markers; BT5 using the chisel tip to create the outline and PL2, PL4, PL5, LV1 and LV3 to colour in the triangles.  I happened to have some card that matched the turquoise marker colour almost perfectly, which I used for the card base.  The sentiment is from an old sticker collection by American Crafts which has been in my stash for years!  I added the faux stitching around the perimeter to help it stand out more.  It just goes to show that you don't always need stamps, patterned papers and fancy dies to create a striking card.

Paper Flower Pot

Inspired by the pop-up box card, I thought it would be fun to use the same principle to create a different shape.  A plant pot came to mind and I do like to make paper flowers, so I put the two together and voila!

Unlike the pop-up box, the plant pot is only connected along the top edge.  The sides have been cut away to create the pot shape.  I used two strips of card on each side to connect the front and back of the pot to give it some stability.

The flowers have all been made with either punched hearts, or using hand-drawn heart templates.  I stuck 5 heart petals together at their tips to create each flower.  I also scored along the petals before colouring them to give some texture, then shaped the petals by curling gently.  Most of the petals were cut from plain white card, which I then coloured with Spectrum Noir alcohol markers.  A couple were cut from pink paper and then coloured blue.

Some of the stamens were made by snipping at regular intervals into a thin rectangular strip of card and then rolling that up and fanning out the cut fringes.  The rest were made using Flower Soft by Katy Sue.  I actually much prefer those.  I added a few die cut and freeform leaves, and some decorative flourishes by Tattered Lace to finish off the display.  Because the pot is made using the same principle as the pop-up box, it does flatten, so in theory you could make one of these and send it in the post.

Text Accents

I've been watching a lot of YouTube for inspiration for mixed media and also making my own embellishments.  I see a lot of people use Tim Holtz's Idea-ology word stickers for text accents.  I don't have any of those, but I do have a few mini alphabet stamps, so I thought it would be fun to make my own (and less expensive too).

For these I used a Dovecraft set, which I got on sale for £1 at Hobbycraft.  Stamp any words that you like then cut out the strip.  It's a quick, easy and cheap way to add text accents to projects, with the added benefits that you only get the words that you want as many times as you want.  The stamp sets come in various styles, so could work for lots of different types of projects.

This is not a sponsored post and does NOT contain affiliate links.  These are my own opions based on products that I have bought.

Black and White With a Pop of Colour

Over on both the CAS on Sunday and The Paper Players blogs the challenge is to use black and white with one colour.  I've combined that brief with the Freshly Made Sketches sketch challenge.

Hello!

It's been a while since I entered a cardmaking challenge or posted on the blog.  It seems appropriate to start off my comeback with a "Hello".

I got this gorgeous "hello" stamp as a freebie with a Docrafts Creativity magazine and it's been languishing in the bottom of my stamp stash for months.  I can't believe that I waited this long to use it, but now that it's made its debut I can see it being used a lot.

The background was made by flicking gold paint onto the card base.  The sentiment was stamped onto a card panel and heat embossed with gold.  I then made a rough outline of the sentiment panel with a gold pen and popped it up on the card base with foam tape.  Three gold gems, placed randomly finished off the card.

Today I'm entering the following challenges:

Daring Cardmakers (New), and
CAS-Ual Fridays (Gold)