IT'S REVEAL DAY AT STUDIO CALICO (or the night before if you are reading this the night before)... On my last post, I showed you my sneaks for the November kits. Tonight I want to show you how I made my watercolored hearts on many of my sneaks.
The main Walden project life kit has one stamp in it. When I first saw the kit, I was a little dissapointed. I didn't think I would get much use out of one larger stamp rather than a grouping of stamps. I ended up so pleased when I received the stamp though. I honestly used that one heart stamp more times on my spread than any stamp set in the PL kits in the past two years. And I know I'll get a lot of future use out of it as well.
I wanted to show you the techniques I used with this stamp. I'll call this Watercolored Hearts. Here is a project I used them on:
And here are the steps I took to make these hearts:
The first thing I did is stamp the hearts using several Color Theory ink colors on mixed media (or watercolor) paper. Sometimes I would use two colors on one stamped image (such as the brown above) by pressing the stamp into the lighter image first and then touching just the sides on the darker shade second. I used the following colors of ink: Poppy, Grey Area, Clear Blue, Creme Brulee and Lemon Zest from the New Ink Set. The new Clear Blue is my favorite blue so far and the Lemon Zest is a perfect yellow orange. I also really like the Poppy as it is more of an orange red than a blue red. Next, I used some of the other colors including Clean Slate, Yes Peas, Orange County, Coral Bay, Lime Light, and Doc Brown.
Next, I blended the ink on each heart with a water brush. Don't use too much water or you will remove the pattern from the inside of the heart. On some of the hearts, I would pick up a color from one heart and move it to the inside of another heart to shade. You can see that I used some of the red on the orange heart above and some of the yellow on the blue heart above. This makes the hearts multicolored. Again, don't use too much water or over blend or you will end up with one color instead of two.
The next step is optional and could really be attained with just more layers of the colored inks. You can dip your waterbrush right on the ink pad to transfer more color to the hearts. If you have Neocolors though, they also are great for adding additional shading. I used several of my fall colors including Bronze, Vermillion, Orange, Salmon, Turquoise Blue, and Lime Green. I colored lightly on one side of the heart and then moved the color around using my water brush.
Once you are done painting your hearts, you just cut them out to use on your projects. I have quite a few ready to add to future projects because I think the stamping and painting is so fun! Here is another method I used with the heart stamp to create a patterned paper for a background:
And last, here is a set of cards I used the hearts on: (these use ONLY the Walden PL Kit):
Hope all this motivates you to use your project life heart stamp A LOT this month! Happy Reveal Day! suzy
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