Loving Watercolors!

I am taking the Watercolor Class - Intermediate at Online Card Classes.  I am barely through Lesson 1 (ok, I'm NOT through Lesson 1 yet!) and have already learned so much.  It's a really great class and if you have any interest in increasing your watercolor skills then I certainly recommend it!

In the pre-class exercises we worked on color swatching, color mixing, and transparency vs. opacity in our paints.  Very interesting stuff there! In Lesson 1 we actually created a card where we applied our new found knowledge of creating color washes.  Interesting and fun stuff!

The instructor, Dawn created a really awesome card by tracing around a pear and dropping color onto it.  I didn't have anything like that and the supplies I had on hand were limited so I cut out a design with my Silhouette and traced around it.  Two little birdies.

Here's the first one I did with Kuretake Gansai colors:

The bird on the right got a little muddied as the colors mixed but it was fun to do anyway, and since I took this photo with my iPhone the colors may be a bit off.  I think they are more vibrant in real life.
I used a Lawn Fawn sentiment stamped in Hero Arts Cup o' Joe.

Then I did it again using Winsor and Newton tube paints.  Basic red, blue, and yellow that I mixed for a variety of colors.

I love the variations of the red, blues and purples.....a little yellow and red for an orangey beak and all the colors mixed for some variations in brown on the limb.  I stamped the sentiment with MFT's Things With Wings stamp set.

And voila (!)....they look like birds on a limb! LOL! Very fun to do and pretty easy...but of course, you'll never get exactly the same results twice. 

Off to Lesson 2 1b! 

Happy Crafting!

Happy Birthday to You!

Can it be???! A second post for today?  I felt sort of guilty about just posting about Evernote and how great the program is for keeping track of your stash so I decided to actually post a recent card I made. Evernote is great...but that whole post was sort of blah...so here's to a little non-blah, I hope.

I recently bought the Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors. I had seen so many of my favorite bloggers using them that I just had to get a set of my own.  They had been on my wish list for a long time so I finally bit the bullet and picked them up off Amazon.  How wonderful and vibrant they are! I have enjoyed playing with them a bit recently.

I made this card using the fabulous (and older) Secret Garden set from Stampin' Up.  I also used a die from Lawn Fawn for the sentiment.  Before coloring in the flower I heat embossed the stamped image with white embossing powder.

I swear the watercoloring looks better with prettier shading in real life.  Trust me! It couldn't be that I don't know what I'm doing...LOL!

Happy  Crafting!