Watercolor Surprises & Grounding Sentiments

Last month for the July 2016 Papertrey Ink Blog Hop, Nichole Heady gave us a beautiful inspiration piece of a photograph of home decor in some soft corals and misty blues.  In my initial attempt to capture the look of that wallpaper, I have what some would consider a failed attempt but what I call a "Watercolor Surprise".  I liked it so much in fact, that I saved it to return to another day, that being today.  For the particular piece I did today, I did some very random ink blending with a Mini Ink Blending Tool in Soft Stone Ink (like the rug in the photo) all over a 4.25 x 5.5 inch panel of watercolor paper, misted it with water, let it air dry and then added in some more random ink blending using Lovely Lady Ink.  I misted the panel again with a bit more water this time to really let the colors blend and merge how they wanted and set it aside for a while to air dry.

Next I stamped the large bloom and leaves from the Beautiful Day Stamp Set (a favorite that I use often) in Versamark onto watercolor paper and heat embossed them using Simon Says Stamp Antique Gold Embossing Powder.  I colored those images using Ocean Tides and Lovely Lady inks.  I stamped a sentiment on Stamper's Select White using Altenew's Sentiments & Quotes (I love this particular quote from Abraham Lincoln) and heat embossed it using the same embossing powder. This is a very wide quote but I wanted it to be slightly narrower than my card front width of 4.25 inches. I eyeballed it at the time but measured it for you just now and the width of the sentiment strip is 3 7/8ths inches by .75 inches tall.  I also cut a label from gold foiled cardstock using Spellbinders Labels 42 and Labels 42 Decorative Elements to go behind the floral elements.

For the background panel, I went back to my original piece of ink blended watercolor paper and carefully drew in the lines for the "wallpaper" of the original inspiration image.  When you are using ink, you don't get a do-over.  I used a T-Ruler and a "Stardust" Pen from Sakura in Clear. I wanted to recreate the geometric pattern of that wallpaper which is visible but still subtle.  Once I had that done, I misted the panel with Tsukineko Sparkle Sheer Shimmer Spritz and let it dry. I noticed this shimmer spritz is becoming very popular lately with some of the more well known cardmakers in the industry but I have been using it all along and it is the reason I chose the name "Twinkling Paper Studio".  *Ü*

Once that panel was dry, I could go ahead and put my card together.  I started by trimming my background panel down to 4 1/8th x 5 3/8ths so that just a narrow border of the Stamper's Select White Card Base would be showing.

I really like using frames or labels to ground my other images and the sentiment strip also helps with that.  In fact, that is the theme of this week's Make It Monday over at Papertrey.  Normally I try to use a lot more Papertrey Ink products when I participate in their Make It Monday's but I met the required "at least one" Papertrey Ink Product for this card by using their inks and their cardstock. I decided to go ahead and use this card as a further example of grounding images on your card fronts. The frame and the sentiment strip both do that rather than making your images look as if they appeared from out of nowhere and are just floating by.

As always, I have linked the products I used in my post and you can click on the affiliate links on the right hand side bar to shop for supplies.  Feel free to leave any comments or questions for me here or in the contact me form.  I read every comment and appreciate each and every one. Thanks for stopping by today and I'll be back very soon with another project.