Orange Poppies

As you can see I haven’t finished experimenting with the poppy stamp just yet. I have another one after this one too and I noticed as I finished off this one that the watercolouring has got progressively looser in each design. In the first one, Pink Poppies I worked slowly with a fairly small brush, the second, Red Poppies, my brush work was looser but still contained by embossed borders. In this one I stayed mostly inside the outlines but pulled and pushed the colour around quickly with broader strokes. My next version is even looser. I worked with distress stains for this design. I inked the stamp with spiced marmalade and ripe persimmon stains on the petals and peeled paint on the stems and seed pods. I restamped the image after spritzing it with water. I didn’t re-ink because there was still plenty of stain left on the stamp. Then I did the same again. You can see the image on the left hand side is paler as the stain was more diluted by the time I stamped that one.

The stain sits on the hotpressed watercolour paper for a little while without soaking in which makes it possible to pull the colour into the petals and ‘paint’ them using the stamped stain. I do add more stain where I want it a little darker or dilute it with water to make it lighter. I painted the seed pods in the same way but added some vintage photo stain. Some colour does run in a direction you don’t want from time to time but I like a little bit of that on a loose watercolour. I added the blue background after the poppies were totally dry working with a water laden brush first then dropping tumbled glass stain and painting that around all the flowers. I added some splatters once the blue was dry.

Although I was happy with the poppies over all, some of the stems and seedpods crossing over and overlapping with the lower poppies in the bottom right corner did get a bit messy. I didn’t want to crop them out completely and lose half my panel so I decided to add the sentiment over the top held in place with a pretty little die cut flourish. The flourish is attached using ‘stick it’ adhesive sheet and the sentiment oval  is popped up on dimensional squares. The nice thing about ‘stick it’ adhesive sheets is that you have a few moments to adjust the positioning before it sticks permanently so I was able to position the flourish then lift the little curls I wanted to sit on top of the popped up oval before pressing all the flourish firmly onto the panel. (Edited to add: I noticed the next day that I had called this post Orange Tulips! I’ve changed it to poppies)

Supplies: Stamps: Blooming Garden, Snippets (PB) Creative Dies: flourish (PB) Inks: Peeled Paint, Spiced Marmalade, Ripe Persimmon, Vintage Photo, Tumbled Glass distress stains (Ranger) Cardstock: Fabriano 100% cotton hot pressed watercolour paper,  Neenah Classic Crest Natural White 110lb smooth, blue and green cardstock Also:  Stick it adhesive sheets, scrapbook adhesive dimensional squares