Creative Watercolor Media

Apologies that there’s no catchy pun to go along with this - I did try, and came up empty.

I haven’t watercolored for a while, but it’s not for lack of supplies! I’ve used traditional watercolor paints, and watercolor pencils, so I tried a totally new medium - shimmer sprays! Altenew makes beautiful, shimmery ink sprays in colors that coordinate with their regular inks (of course).

Altenew is known in the industry for beautiful florals. I wanted to use a large image, so I went with Statement Flowers for it’s, well, statement flowers.

I went WAY out of my comfort zone and decided to use shimmer sprays as my coloring medium. First I had to get my image ready. I placed the stamp into my stamp positioner, it’s a good practice when you use watercolor paper since you’ll probably need to stamp the image more than once to get a good impression. I stamped and embossed with Pure White Crisp Embossing powder, and now I have a guard to keep the wet colors where I want them.

I used Sunkissed and Orange Cream Metallic Shimmer Sprays to color the flowers, trying to use a bit of each on the large flower, and on the smaller flower I used Sunkissed (the lighter color) on the inside and Orange Cream on the outside, I used Frayed Leaf and Moss ink cubes with a water brush for the leaves. I was really happy with how the colors looked - except for one thing. I must not have shaken the bottles well enough, because the flowers looked really flat, no shimmer at all.

I didn’t want to toss the whole thing away, so I went for a desperate solution - Iridescent Metallic Shimmer Spray. I made sure to shake it really well, sprayed it onto a palette, and very carefully brushed it over both flowers. I had to be careful because the sprays are water-soluble, and the Iridescent spray could remove the other colors if I brushed too much. Then I thought it needed a little more sparkle (shout out to Erum), so I spattered it with Antique Gold Metallic Spray. I covered the flowers with my hand, to make sure they weren’t accidentally spattered on.

The card still needed some sort of greeting, and the available space was pretty limited, so I went to the Reason to Smile stamp set because there are different sizes of greetings. Note to self: plan your layout ahead. If I had to do it over, I would move the flowers to the left (maybe even off the card), leaving more space for the greeting.

Not all cards are a “10”, but this is a learning process, and I’m still learning. I’m looking forward to getting more practice with watercolor. Maybe the next watercolor adventure will be with Watercolor Pencils and the new Watercolor Brushes!

Thanks for reading! Look for a revised version sometime soon!

Take care and be kind!

XO

Sue