As we end the week celebrating Avery Elle and Heather Campbell here in the CLASSroom, I wanted to share one of the things I love about Heather's images: the variety -- from sweet, cute and sassy, to beautiful and classy! For my project today, I'm using Heather's Peonies clear stamp set:
I've combined the stamp set with Julie's Essentials by Ellen Many Thanks die, to create this much-needed-after-the-holidays thank you card:
To create the card, I placed a 5.50" x 4" panel of Ranger Watercolor Paper in my Misti so I could stamp the images in Versamark ink a couple of times. With the textured surface and absorbent qualities of watercolor paper, I wanted to be sure to get excellent ink coverage for my heat embossing. Next, I positioned all the stamps I wanted to use face down on the watercolor paper around the die sentiment, then closed the lid of the Misti to pick up the stamps. After inking and stamping the images twice, I heat embossed them with Ranger Gold Super Fine Embossing Powder.
Next, I used my Black Velvet Short Round 8 Watercolor Brush and Kuretake Gansai Tambi 36 color set to watercolor the images. Please allow me to talk a minute about this fabulous watercolor brush. For convenience, I had always used a water-fillable waterbrush but recently decided to give this wonderful professional watercolor brush a try and boy, I sure am glad I did! These brushes are made of a unique blend of natural squirrel hair and black synthetic filaments. Squirrel hair holds large amounts of color and is highly responsive to your touch, which allows for creating shapes beautifully while it releases color with great control. By itself, squirrel is delicate. Blending it with a synthetic helps it to resist wear and maintain a wonderful snap (snap is the ability to retain its shape) and spring. This soft blend allows multiple layer glazing without disturbing previous colors, yet it’s firm enough to lift color with a gentle scrub. There are many sizes available, but I think this Short Round 8 will be very versatile and my favorite go-to!
I used No. 34 Dark Pink and No. 37 Deep Pink for the Peonies:
Then I used No. 53 Mid Green for the leaves:
And by the way, this green looks to me to be very close to Pantone's new Color of the Year 2017, Greenery -- What do you think? :)
To finish the watercolor panel, I used a little No. 50 Pale Aqua around the bottom edge. Then I masked off the colored images with a few sticky notes, and used No. 91 Bluish Gold to flick some golden dots over the top part of the panel. You'll notice in the photo below, the bottom three watercolors in the Kuretake Gansai Tambi 36 color set are No. 95 Silver, the Bluish Gold I used, and No. 90 Gold, which are all pearlized/metallics -- SO pretty!
To finish the card, I also watercolored the 1/4-inch strip I had trimmed off my 4.25" x 5.50" watercolor panel with the Bluish Gold color, then adhered it to the bottom of my Neenah 110 Lb. Solar White card base. I like using X-Press It High Tack Double-Sided 1/2" Tape to adhere heavier cardstock such as watercolor paper. After adhering the watercolor panel to the card base, I die cut gold foiled cardstock (swoon!) with Julie's Many Thanks die and adhered the pretty sentiment to the card.
I hope you will take the opportunity to browse the Avery Elle Clear Stamps and ELLE-ments Dies by Heather Campbell and all of Avery Elle's products in Ellen's store while they are still on sale thru Sunday, January 8th . . . Thanks so much for joining me today!
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