Hi there! I am so excited to be helping my friends at Colorado Craft Company to introduce their new illustrator and a darling new line of stamps for their February 2022 release! You should have arrived here from Donna Hitz, and your next stop is Jasleen Kaur. You can also start back at the beginning at Adrienne Kennedy CCC. I loved the sweet little mice in the new release, but you know me and flowers… I couldn’t resist doing some painting with the absolutely stunning Happy Peony stamp set, so let’s get started with the details!
I began by silver embossing the main image from Happy Peony onto the back of some Arches Cold Press watercolor paper. I find that, when stamping and embossing really detailed images like this onto watercolor paper, the back side of the cold press has slightly less texture, and thus gives a smoother embossed image. After embossing, I taped the panel down to my watercolor board to reduce warping, then added a thick wash of clean water to the panel followed by a diluted layer of purple, blue, and teal Daniel Smith watercolors. I was very free with this pale watercolors, allowing the colors to bleed and blend into each other, not caring whether I was painting a leaf or a flower petal. This diluted layer dried, as all watercolors do, much lighter than when I laid it down, creating a lovely base layer of color for my image.
Once the base layer was dry (I did use my heat gun to speed up the process), I added details using more intense shades of the same colors, painting the peonies blue (who says we can’t have blue peonies?), with touches of purple and teal. I die cut the finished watercolored piece using the coordinating dies.
Once I had finished painting, I blended some deep teal ink on a corner of a coordinating teal A2 card base, then splattered the background with some pearlescent white gouache. The base layer of the peony, painted freely and without attention to the edges of the image, creates a colorful edge around the die cut image, which avoids the white die cut edge that I try to avoid if possible. (Ha! I hate having that stark white edge against a richly colored card base, especially if there is not other white on the card front.) I popped up the die cut using foam adhesive, then added a greeting from Happy Peony with some more foam tape, double layering in some spots to get tons of dimension. The final step was to add some iridescent purple gems for sparkle.
Well, that’s all for today’s project! To celebrate their new release, Colorado Craft Company is sponsoring a giveaway for each stop on the blog hop. To enter, simply leave a comment on this blog post by February 14, 2022. The winners will be announced on the Colorado Craft Company blog on February 16th.
I hope you’ll check out the new stamps from Kris Lauren at Colorado Craft Company; the entire line is absolutely charming. Your next stop on the hop is Jasleen Kaur. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and happy hopping!
