Video: Loose Watercoloring on Hot Foiled Images with Pinkfresh Studio!

Hi there! I am excited to share that I have re-joined the Pinkfresh Studio team as part of their Video Team! I am so thrilled to be working with the beautiful and innovative products from Pinkfresh each month, and I can’t wait to share some of what we’ve been working on, including lots of new sets that I have illustrated. (Eeep!) Tons of fun stuff coming this year!

For today’s post, I have a new video on the Pinkfresh Studio YouTube Channel sharing some simple ways to add watercolor to your standalone die cuts and hot foiled pieces. Click here to watch the video on YouTube or watch here on my blog!

I share the details of how I created this project in the video, but in case you can’t watch, here’s a quick synopsis of the process:

I began by die cutting the new Artistic Blossoms dies from some Arches Cold Press watercolor paper. I reserved the negative and after checking to be sure that the intricate dies had cut all the way through, I placed the die cuts back in their negative die cut spaces and used Schmincke watercolors to add some lovely shades of green, blue, and purple to the images. I was very loose with the watercoloring, not taking too much time to do any of my regular meticulous shading.

Next, I did some watercoloring on a panel of Arches Hot Press paper, on which I had used the gorgeous new Geo Blocks foil plate with some shiny charcoal foil. While I tend to use cold press paper for the vast majority of my watercoloring, I like to use hot press paper with foiling, because it is super smooth and reacts with the foil beautifully. I taped my foiled background down to my watercolor board using some low-tack washi tape, then covered it with clean water. On this wet background, I added an ombré background using the same three shades of Schmincke watercolors, maneuvering the color until I had a smooth gradient.

While my background was drying, I die cut a vellum envelope using the Floral Envelope die and some heavyweight vellum cardstock. I arranged my watercolored die cuts inside the envelope, adhering them to the vellum using liquid adhesive. Once my watercolored foil background had dried, I adhered it to an A2 cardstock base in a coordinating shade of purple to create a mat around the edge. I popped up an Ornate Oval Frame die cut from glittering white cardstock to the watercolored card front using foam adhesive, then added my vellum envelope of watercolored flowers. To help hide the adhesive and keep it from ruining the vellum envelope die cut, I adhered my foiled Fancy Script Words sentiment die cut directly to the vellum with liquid adhesive. I then added the foam adhesive, hiding it behind the solid die cuts that I’d adhered to the vellum envelope. The final touch was to add some Ocean Breeze Essentials Jewels to the card front to fill in any gaps left in the design.

Well, that’s all for my project today! If you enjoyed this video, please give a thumbs up, and you can also subscribe to the Pinkfresh Studio YouTube channel to get tons of gorgeous content from the entire team. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!