Tips and Tricks - Making Pretty Cards

My last post talked about the simple layers we chatted about at a recent Tips & Tricks night. If you missed that post, you can see it here. The other topic that night was colouring with the Water Painters. There are lots of different ways to colour with Stampin’ Up! products, and there are lots of different types of colouring you can do with Water Painters.

We played with Watercolour Paper, Shimmery White Cardstock, and regular Basic White cardstock so we could see how the different papers reacted.
For the first card, we did a simple was of colour. Once that had dried, we stamped our image with Memento Black ink. The Gold Foil frame on this card was embossed with the Tasteful Textile 3D Embossing Folder.

We also used the Water Painter to colour. We stamped some ink on a clear block and used the Water Painter to lift the colour onto the brush to colour with.

The flower was embossed with Gold Embossing Powder which gives a nice little border for colouring in, and helps you stay inside the lines!! We also did some that had been stamped with StazOn black ink. It is important to remember when water colouring that the ink you use for your stamp must be a permanent ink. Our regular inks are water based (which is why they are great with our alcohol based Stampin’ Blends), so the stamped image does not bleed when you water colour.

This card also demonstrated some more of our easy layers for the pretty Ornate Garden Specialty Designer Series Paper, and the frame around the sentiment, which is from the To A Wild Rose stamp set. The flower and leaves are also from the To A Wild Rose stamp set, so I used the coordinating Wild Rose Dies to cut them out for the card.

Since we were playing around, we decided to see what would happen if we washed water over our entire piece of cardstock and stamped on it while it was still wet. I used stamps from the Pretty Perennials stamp set since they have a watercolour look to them.

Our results on this card were not spectacular, as the flowers bled quite a bit where the paper was rather wet. It was fun to try, and in card making there are no mistakes, only opportunities. I simply adhered the sentiment over the part that had bled the most, and the card turned out fine!

We had a great evening playing and learning together, and ended up with some lovely cards ready to send and share.