Watercolour Wednesday Citrus Blooms

Do you like watercolour? Are you a little intimidated by it? Well if you answer yes to both today's card might be just for you! Made using the Citrus Blooms bundle of stamps and dies and using what I call a wet watercolour wash technique you can create gorgeous watercolour effects.

Start with the background piece. Take a piece of watercolour paper and attach it to a board, make use of the grey board from packs of pattern paper 😉, using low tack tape and creating a narrow boarder around the piece. Taping your watercolour paper to a board allows the panel to remain flat. 

Now take your water spritzer and thoroughly spritz the panel. It needs to be wet! Then using almost neat reinker gently dab the colours to the paper. Allow the colour to spread via the water on the panel. Using 3 shades of one colour gives a great tonal effect to the piece. Use kitchen roll to dab any excess and water that runs of the paper.

Once completely dry remove from the board.

Then take the large frame die and the small foliage die and place them in the center of the panel and cut out.

With the main panel complete repeat the process on a smaller panel of watercolour paper and using an orange colour ink.

This time instead of die cutting stamp the image of the orange using a dark brown ink onto the panel. 

Now stamp the same image with the brown ink  onto a piece of vanilla cardstock and die cut it out. Then fussy cut the orange from the watercolour paper along the stamped lines. Top tip here is that when you've finished cutting it out take a marker pen in the same colour and run it along the cut edges. This creates a more seamless look once the fussy cut piece is adhered to the stamped image. This technique is called paper piecing. 

For those of us who find watercolouring an image different the wet watercolour wash and paper piecing tequniques provide a beautiful alternative 😀 

Once all the pieces are layered together the final card has an elegant look. Keeping the card base and layers in the same colour palette as the background piece gives a harmonious feel. The pop of orange on the fruit and flowers brings a little zest to the finished card.

The small foliage flourish that was die cut from the background piece is used to decorate the inside of the card.

A fun and easy way to create a watercolour card with no stress at all!