Today, I am over on the Pinkfresh Studio YouTube channel sharing a project inspired by that most classic of fine art pieces: Monet’s Water Lilies! Using ink blending, some loose watercoloring, a little vellum, and lots of watercolor “blooms,” I have created this ethereal watercolored card using the Beautiful Blooms stamps and some Pinkfresh Studio Premium Dye ink pads! Check out the video below:
Or you can click HERE to watch in HD on YouTube.
I have always loved Monet’s Water Lilies painting, with it’s ethereal, dreamlike aesthetic, and so I attempted to channel that look with my loose watercoloring for today’s project. I began by doing some very simple blending on some watercolor paper using Candy Violet (for the lilies), Meadow (for the lilypads), and Blue Jay inks, then spritzing the blended panel with water and moving the color around with my wet paintbrush. The water-based dye inks will still move on the watercolor paper, giving you another option for use!
Once I had finished my blending, I set aside the panel to dry and then heat embossed one of the floral trio stamps from Beautiful Blooms onto some more watercolor paper using white embossing powder. After heat embossing, I covered the panel in clean, clear water in order to do some wet-on-wet watercoloring. I tapped out the three shades of ink used on my blended background panel onto my glass mat, then diluted them and dropped them onto my very wet panel of watercolor paper, paying very little attention to where they were supposed to go and spilling the colors over the edges of the images, which allows me to avoid the pesky white edge on the finished die cuts!
After my initial layer of diluted color had dried, I went back in with more concentrated color to enhance the colors of the individual images, again employing the wet-on-wet technique by wetting only the image that I wanted to enhance and dropping in the color, allowing the pigment to bloom on the wet watercolor paper. I die cut the finished images with the handy dandy one-piece coordinating die.
With my blooms complete, I turned my attention back to the background, now dry. The blended background colors were a bit more intense than I initially had envisioned, so to help soften the background, I placed a full size A2 panel of heavyweight vellum over the top, which immediately softened the colors and made the blending even more ethereal than before! I added an iridescent white shimmer die cut frame over the top, cut using the larger frame from the Art Deco Frame die. For the greeting, I searched my stash of hot foiled sentiments to find one that tucked into my watercolored bouquet nicely, finally settling on a sentiment created using the Wonderful Sentiments Hot Foil Plate and Coordinating Die set and the Solid Hot Foil Plate. I adhered everything over the top of the blended, vellum background with some foam tape, then added a few iridescent drops for some more sparkle!
Well, that’s all for my project today! Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!
Love the watercolor effect! Pretty colors–Pink Fresh’s colors are beautiful.
Really Gorgeous!!! Monet is one of my favorite artists!!