Embossed Watercoloring Experiment

m Good Morning All,

I hope you're having a lovely Saturday morning.  We have rain here, which is unusual for Northern California.  Usually September is our warmest month, but I have given up trying to predict what kind of weather we will have after the unusually cool summer we just had. 

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to try combining embossing and watercoloring.  This is not a new technique, but I wanted to alter the technique a bit to make it "new".  So here we go....

I started out by stamping my image from the "Morning Soft" stamp set three times and embossing with fine black embossing powder. 

The next step is to watercolor.  I used a waterbrush and my SU re-inkers, starting with a light yellow wash on the background of one of my stamped images.  This will be my base.  It then watercolored three stamped images, starting from the lightest to darkest colors.  Let dry.

The next step is to cut out two of the stamped images.  To do this you want to look at the "depth" of the image; what is the closest the the viewer?  What is the furthest away.  The leaves in my images that are the furtherest from view are going to stay on my base and will not be cute out.  The next level of leaves and flowers will be cut out from the second stamped image, and then the last and closest leaves and flowers will be cut out to form the top layer.  Clear as mud you say?  It will become easier to visualize in the next photo.

Okay, so you see I have my flowers and leaves cut out and ready to attach to the base image.  I used a dark felt marker and went around the cut edges, so there would be no white showing.

The final step is putting it together.  I used a mouse pad and an embossing tool to shape the images from the back to give them more dimension.  I then used some fast-drying glue (or glue dots will work) before attaching the layers to my main image.

And here's the finished card.  I added some patterned paper, gathered ribbon and buttons.  I also added some faux stitching with a black pen to the edge of the image and then mounted it on the card asymmetrically to add more interest. Before I forget, I spritzed the finished layered image with a bit of Smooch Spritz in clear glitter to give a little sparkle and also added some black seed beads to the center of the flowers.  I'm loving seed beads lately. I hope you liked this tutorial and will try this technique soon.

Til Next Time,