Monday 4 May 2015

Happy Birthday Mom

Welcome to our "anything goes" May Linky Party!

My creativity up and left me this month. This month's contribution was born of the need for a Birthday Card for my Mother's 90th Birthday on May 7. It all kind of came together based on what she likes. She has never understood stamping and always says to me "why don't you just draw or watercolour, why would you use a stamp". 

My parents were very generous with lessons as we were growing up and I had watercolour and oil painting lessons. She understands when I have my friends over to stamp and sees the social aspect versus me all alone in my studio painting but fails to understand stamping is a different art form than painting. Mom loves it when I watercolour her a card, so it was a given that my card must be watercoloured. She also loves roses and Crafty Secrets just digitalized my favourite Rose Stamp so that was also a given. Totally by accident I realized when you get a copier image wet the colour runs, much the same way a watercolour does so I printed the rose in a rose shade and the leaves green then deliberately allowed the print to run. This is what I ended up with.


You can see where the colour ran outside the lines. How I did this was as soon as the image came off the printer I immediately took a wet brush to it to allow the lines to smudge. I pooled the water on a line and then tilted the paper so it would run the direction I wanted, that way I could accomplish the desired shading. I worked from the inside petal edge to the outer edge painting the larger petals first as they were easier to manoeuvre, adding in more colour as needed.  All colouring work looks best if you leave some white areas. To create the white areas on this rose I painted the areas I wanted to stay white with frisket. If there are any of you that don't know what frisket is, it is a rubbery fluid you apply to create a mask. Any art store or even Michael's would carry it.

Here is a close up of the rose.


 I tried this on cardstock and 80 lb watercolour paper. The cardstock runs better but you can't "work" it very much as it pills. The water colour paper allows you to play more without the pilling. I also tried watercolouring with H2O's which turned out very well. The colour is more true to the actual colours on the second image than the first, the first one is a bit over exposed. 

It was enjoyable this month to just get out the paint brushes and not fussy cut for ages. I haven't made a card for a long time that didn't require dimentionals! This was made with my Mom in mind to her tastes, she doesn't like buttons and lace, multiple layers and images, in fact she finds most of my cards to be overly fussy. I guess you would call her plain and simple kind of person. Thankfully I know she will love this.  I hope you'll try some watercolour experiments.

Now it's your turn to dazzle us with your creations! Please use Crafty Secret products in your project if you want to be eligible for the grand prize.  Be sure to link up your project to the Crafty Secrets BLOG so that you can be eligible to win this month's prize package. Details and guidelines can be found on the Crafty Secrets Blog. 


Please visit the rest of the design team to see the beautiful projects they have created.


Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com
Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/
Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/
Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/
Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/
Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker http://chelemom.blogspot.com/ 
Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/
Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Teresa Golirsch Horner, Victorian Paper Queen, http://victorianpaperqueen.blogspot.ca/
Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers, 

Elizabeth