Good morning! Even as a seasoned cardmaker, I enjoy enjoy learning tips & tricks from other crafters. My favorite tip/trick is to use artwork and fashion found on Pinterest as inspiration for my cards. You can find some really beautiful and unique color combinations, layouts, and technique ideas from fashion and artwork photos on Pinterest. I get a lot of help on floral layouts from looking at wedding bouquets and floral patterned clothes on Pinterest.
Today, the new Ellen Hutson Design Team is having a special blog hop to help introduce all of the new team members! We were supposed to use our “favorite-” medium, stamp set, colors, etc. I combined several of those to create this pretty watercolored card!
For my project today, I chose to create a no-line (almost) one layer card using some of my absolute favorite Essentials By Ellen products and Distress Inks for watercolors. I started by cutting a mask from the Mondo Hydrangea stamp set for the main flower, then stamping that same image again on some Arches watercolor paper using very pale gray ink. I placed the mask over the hydrangea, then stamped the leaves from Mondo Hydrangea and some of the smaller blooms and foliage from Mondo Peony using the same light gray ink. The nice thing about no-line coloring is that, even if your masking isn’t perfect and you get some overlapping lines (ahem, don’t look closely at my foliage in this next photo), you can still fudge it because those lines are mostly covered up by the coloring.
To watercolor the flowers, I chose to use a looser style of watercoloring, not quite so detailed as I normally would have done with my Daniel Smith or my Zigs… Distress Inks are a different animal when it comes to blending and shading, so you have to adjust accordingly. 🙂 I will list the different inks individually at the bottom of the post, but the main colors are Picked Raspberry, Wilted Violet, Salty Ocean, and Lucky Clover. I simply tapped them onto a piece of laminated card stock and picked the ink up with my paintbrush. For the shadows, I added in deeper shades of the same colors on the second layer for the shading, occasionally adding in some Pumice Stone to my color mixture to create shadows and depth.
The key with no-line watercolor is to work in sections that are not right next to each other. Watercolor a petal or two, then move to a completely different area. This helps to avoid the colors bleeding into each other, which also has the unpleasant effect of losing your crisp edges, and thus making your project a muddy mess. 🙂 After I had finished coloring all of the flowers, I allowed plenty of drying time before adding my halo of Wilted Violet around the edge of my bouquet. I added a few splatters with a flick of my paintbrush and added a few Nuvo Drops in Carnation Pink to help round out the bouquet and add some texture.
I trimmed down the edges to mount it on a royal purple mat and added a sentiment from Altenew’s Just Because stamp set heat embossed in white on navy blue card stock and popped up with dimensional adhesive. And that’s all for that project! Very loose watercoloring, but those bright Distress Ink colors really make those flowers pop off the page!
In the spirit of getting to know the new Ellen Hutson Design Team, here is a little info about me that you might not know:
~Coffee or tea? Depends on the time of day and the temperature outside. 😉 Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. Sometimes iced, sometimes hot…. But I am an equal opportunity caffeinator.
~How did you come up with your blog name? Our first house was on Sixth Street. When I started blogging, I intended to blog about many different types of crafts, including scrapbooking, party decor, cardmaking, home decor, etc, so Sixth Street Sundries seemed perfect. Plus, I like alliteration haha.
~Tell us one silly/random/interesting tidbit about yourself! I have a master’s degree in vocal performance and have performed as the soprano soloist for Faure’s Requiem at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC! I am also pretty tall, 5’10″… which makes my last name even funnier!
Well, that’s all for me today! If you’ve never been to my blog before, I hope you have enjoyed getting to know me a little bit. I’m so happy you’re here! And for old friends, welcome back! This year is going to be fantastic, I think! Here are links the rest of my esteemed Design Team compatriots:
Ardyth Percy-Robb
Carissa Wiley
Carly Tee Minner
Carolyn Peeler
Elena Roussakis
Emily Midgett
Heather Campbell
Julia Stainton
Julie Ebersole
Justine Hovey
Kelly Griglione
Kittie Caracciolo
Laurel Beard
Lisa Adametz
Lisa Spangler
Lydia Evans
Michele Ferguson
Sandy Allnock
Sharon Harnist
Therese Calvird
