Watercolour and Whimsy

Posted: January 17, 2025 | Author: Heather | Filed under: Hand drawn, Hand painted, Moda Scrap | Tags: Hand drawn, Hand painted, sennelier watercolours | 6 Comments

Last year I taught a class called watercolour and whimsy. The watercolour part focused on colour mixing and how to limit your palette and get cohesive results. The whimsy part included stenciling and doodling. The truth is we spent most of our time on the watercolour leaving little time for the whimsy.

I have gone back to my panels to finish the doodling details. Most were done on cold press watercolour paper with a mix of pan paints and tube paints. For each panel I chose several colours that would not necessarily look great together straight out of the pan/tube but with some mixing ending up looking like they were born to be together. This first one is a favourite. I love the way a deep green, a purple, an orangey red and a blue ended up looking so good together.

I did most of the doodling with a white gel pen with some black sharpie underneath here and there for more contrast. I have more cards to share made as part of the same class. The watercolour colour mixing part of the process is very relaxing and enjoyable. I haven’t added sentiments to either of these cards but I can add one before sending if I wish.

On the panel above and below, I painted again with a limited palette but touched each brush stroke to a previous stroke so that colours flowed into each other. The result was blends, watermarks and harder lines.

To add some whimsy I blended black ink through fern stencils. They are homemade stencils created die-cutting into grafix stencil film with dies from the Moda Scrap ‘fern die set‘.

Once the black ink was dry I doodled different patterns on the fronds with white gel pens. This post includes affiliate links from Foiled Fox. If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Snow on snow on snow

Posted: January 13, 2025 | Author: Heather | Filed under: cricut, Echidna Studios, gel press, grafix, My Favorite Things, snowflake digital stamp set | Tags: cricut, Echidna Studios, gel press, gel printing, grafix | 6 Comments

Today’s cards were gel printed using snowflake masks I cut on the cricut using the Snowflake Digital Stamp Set from Echidna Studios. I love how detailed these snowflakes are; there are six in the set and I have printed them, foiled them, cut them and now gel printed with them.

I remember when I first saw the six pointed detail of a snowflake that had landed on me. It is not always possible but occasionally the flakes are very distinct and separate instead of in clumps and I am always amazed by their beauty.

I cut my stencils from Grafix matte dura-lar as it is semi-transparent and light weight. On the panel above I made a pale print with blue and white then, after it had dried created a dark print on the plate which I pulled on the same paper but with a transparent medium (either transparent white paint or more likely matte medium). The little sentiment is from AALL & Create ‘everyday sentiments’ set.

On this second card I used a pale blue paint which didn’t give me a very bold print but pulling it with gold paint created a soft shimmery effect.

Always looking for the matchy-matchy, I found a scrap of cardstock in the same blue tone and cut a mat and sentiment using MFT little lowercase letter dies.

City Buildings gel print

Posted: January 10, 2025 | Author: Heather | Filed under: city buildings, gel press, The Crafters Workshop | Tags: gel press, gel printing, Penny Black stamps, The Crafter's Workshop | 3 Comments

Quite a simple gel printed card but the freshness of blue and white seems to lend a brightness to it. I used the TCW ‘city buildings’ stencil on a gel plate with blue paint.

My most used technique with stencils on the gel plate is to lay the stencil on the paint covered plate, remove paint from the spaces in the stencil with tissue paper then pull the print with another layer of paint.

When I looked through my tray of sentiments I found this one already stamped in blue on a circle. The colour is a perfect match so I was pretty happy. The circle is a nice contrast to all those angles and lines. The sentiment comes from the Penny Black ‘better with age‘ sentiment set. This post includes affiliate links from Foiled Fox. If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The Calendar Card

Posted: January 9, 2025 | Author: Heather | Filed under: Collage cards, simply perfect mix & match sentiments, Spellbinders | Tags: collage, Spellbinders | 8 Comments

I’ve always liked the thumbnail page on a calendar. There’s something about seeing all the pictures in miniature which I find very cute. So when I bought a desktop calendar for a friend’s birthday I decided to remove the thumbnail page and create the card from the tiny month images.

The calendar is made by the Rifle Paper company and the paintings are quite delightful.

I stacked a white die-cut sentiment on a black one to help it stand out against the busy background. The dies are Spellbinders ‘simply perfect mix & match’ sentiment dies.

This gift has the added feature that if the recipient wishes, she can give me back the calendar pages as the months pass and I will turn them into cards for her to use. I enjoyed coming up with this card and idea and will be going through my calendar collection in the future to find both thumbnails and full pages I can turn into cards. In some ways I have come full circle; I made cards from calendars when I first started card making as a child.

Winter Wedding cards

Posted: January 6, 2025 | Author: Heather | Filed under: cricut, Gilding Flakes, Penny Black, Skyward | Tags: cricut, Gilding, Penny Black stamps | 6 Comments

We attended a New Year’s Eve wedding last week and a couple of days before I realised I had no wedding cards on hand. I went to the ‘pile of possibility’ which is a shoebox full of panels yet to be made into cards. There are watercolour, alcohol ink, collage and stamped panels in the box.

The galaxy style alcohol ink panel above caught my eye along with what I think is a stamped and gilded panel which you’ll see below. Both seemed fancy enough for wedding cards…but how to use them?

The gilded panel below was very pretty alone so I didn’t want to add much to it. The alcohol ink panel was also pretty but worked well with die-cut silver snowflakes.

The panel on the card above features the Penny Black stamp ‘skyward‘ stamped on vellum with sticky glue ink and gilded either with foil or gilding flakes( sorry I can’t remember which.) It looked quite magical so I might just have to try and gild a stamped image again to see what happens. I hunted for a font that was similar to the one featured on the wedding stationery then cut initials using the cricut. The font I chose (which is not an exact match) is Linotype Rowena Pro Medium. I had a gold envelope which matched and a pearly silver one for the other card.

The wedding was lovely, ceremony at the church in the morning, party to ring in the new year at night!

Although it would have been good to have wedding cards on hand already I enjoyed customising these two for the bride and groom. And speaking of weddings, it is my wedding anniversary today. My husband and I were married on a summer’s day 35 years ago in Canberra. We looked a bit older and colder at last week’s wedding!

This post includes affiliate links from Foiled Fox. If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Feathered Edges

Posted: December 23, 2024 | Author: Heather | Filed under: holly berry branch, Penny Black, poinsettia poem | Tags: brutus monroe embossing powder, Penny Black stamps, Ranger Distress inks, Staedtler watercolour brush pens | 2 Comments

I had fun recently experimenting with a feathering technique to add background to embossed line images. This pretty stamp from Penny Black is poinsettia poem embossed in silver powder on Fabriano hot pressed watercolour paper.

Before adding any colour I spritzed the embossed panel with water. I then picked up chipped sapphire distress ink from a mat where I had smooshed the ink pad. Carefully I touched the tip of the inky brush to the area outside the embossing; the ink spread wherever there was water around the image.

I let the whole panel dry before moving on to painting the flowers, berries and leaves using watersoluble brush tip markers.

Above and below is another image that worked well with this technique; it’s holly berry branch from Penny Black. This time I used faded jeans ink for the background which is a lighter, less purply blue resulting in paler blues overall.

This is definitely a technique I will continue to experiment with; the feathery patterns that appear when ink flows across the wet paper are my kind of watercolour!

This post includes affiliate links from Foiled Fox and Scrap’n’Stamp . If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Book Trees

Posted: December 20, 2024 | Author: Heather | Filed under: Dies, modern xmas tree, Penny Black | Tags: Penny Black creative dies | 6 Comments

I gave this Christmas card to a friend who is a journalist. As she studied it she exclaimed, ‘What? You cut up books!’ I explained that yes, I did, but they were not my precious books, most were picked up at second hand book sales or thrift stores.

I painted a selection of pages with distress inks and when the pages dried I glued them to cardstock before using triangle dies to cut them out. After I arranged them on an embossed background I cut a strip of black cardstock into small pieces to tuck under the trees as trunks. Just another simple idea with vintage papers.

Black Christmas Tags

Posted: December 12, 2024 | Author: Heather | Filed under: Baubles, Christmas filigree, Christmas stockings digital stamp set, Echidna Studios, grafix, mittens | Tags: Echidna Studios, grafix, grafix craft plastic | 2 Comments

Last year I decorated some black glass balls for Christmas using a selection of paint pens and metallic brush pens. The opaque colours really pop on black so I decided to do something similar on black craft plastic from Grafix. You can see my process in the video below.

I cut the four different shapes on the cricut using digital cutting files from Echidna Studios (bell, mitten, stocking and bauble) The paint pens were all Posca and the metallic brush pens a brand I found on Amazon.

The dura-bright black (black craft plastic) from Grafix is a good surface for paint pens. It is very smooth and I found writing and drawing on it is very relaxing.

You might not think of black as a Christmas colour but the shine of the metallics and the chalkboard pop of the white is quite fun.

Gingerbread Set

Posted: December 10, 2024 | Author: Heather | Filed under: cricut, Echidna Studios, gingerbread set | Tags: cricut, Echidna Studios, Ranger Distress inks | 3 Comments

So far I have baked two batches of gingerbread for eating and cut one cardstock batch for card-making! The gingerbread set is a digital stamp and cut-file set from Echidna Studios and I have had a delightful time baking/making these samples.

I used the cricut to cut all the gingerbread shapes from a light brown cardstock which wasn’t gingerbread coloured. It was just for a test run. As it turned out when I blended rusty hinge distress ink over most of the cookies and vintage photo over just the edges the colour was very much like my real gingerbread!

I cut all the ‘icing bits’ on the cricut from white cardstock. I added double sided adhesive to the back before cutting so I wouldn’t have to use liquid glue for all that icing!

I don’t need nine gingerbread themed cards right now so I arranged eight of the cookies on cute check patterned paper for a photo and made the gingerbread man into a card.

I glued two more gingerbread men to the back of the decorated one for more dimension and added him to my card. The festive striped paper is from Simple Stories ‘Simple Vintage Yuletide’ paper pad. To tone down the vibrancy a bit I layered a piece of vellum on top cut with scallop scissors which I still have from long ago. The sentiment is from the PB ‘holiday snippets’ set.

I might make a few more cards or perhaps use some of the ‘cookies’ as gift tags. For now I just think they look very cute on that check paper.

Bethlehem Mask

Posted: December 4, 2024 | Author: Heather | Filed under: Bethlehem skyline, Echidna Studios, Finetec paints, gel press, gelli plate | Tags: Echidna Studios, Finetec artist mica watercolour paint, gel press, gel printing | 4 Comments

It’s been quite a while since the gel plates have been out of their tins but I was able to do a few prints recently to turn into Christmas cards. I cut a stencil using the Bethlehem Skyline digital cut file from Echidna Studios. To create the scene above I gel printed a blended grey, copper and blue panel. Next I brayered black onto the plate then lay the Bethlehem mask (cut on the Cricut) on the black before pressing the three coloured panel down on the plate. Once I had put the card together I splattered bronze watercolour paint in the sky as stars.

The panel below is less distinct as I pressed the mask into a layer of Paynes grey paint on the gel plate, removed all paint around the mask then lifted it to reveal a shadowy Bethlehem. Once it was dry I brayered blue and gold paints over the top before pulling the print. Once again I added metallic paint splatter to sky, this time lunar silver.

In a similar style to the carol and stencil cards I shared last week I used the Bethlehem mask cut from Matte Dura-lar to blend a scene on two carol panels cut from vintage carol books.

I blended pale peony over the top edge of the mask then switched to seedless preserves, then to chipped sapphire at the top of the panel. To add depth to the buildings I lifted the mask and positioned it below the first silhouette blended with either pink or grey ink

Once again no need for sentiments on the front but I will stamp a message inside.

To see more cards made with this digital set click here. The set includes two versions of the silhouette plus a outline image for printing. Today’s post features affiliate links to The Foiled Fox. If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.