Seaside Shore

I signed up for a watercolor class at the college nearby.  Today is the first class.  I’m really excited to learn proper techniques that I hope will translate into beautiful Stampin’ Up! projects.  I asked one of my dearest friends, Poli, to take me shopping for the supplies.  Poli is an art teacher and very knowledgeable in all things art.  This is a 6 week class for beginners, I bought only the optional items from the supply list, $350 later, I told Poli, I better be freakin’ Picasso when this is over!!  I’m very overwhelmed by all the supplies needed for this class, and a little nervous.  I love to watercolor and am excited to learn new techniques and to improve on the ones I already know.

I’m starting this post prior to working on the projects for the week, so hopefully I’ll come up with something fabulous to go with the watercolor theme.  Stampin’ Up! products do make it super easy to watercolor, all you need is a stamp pad and an aqua painter.  You just squeeze the stamp pad to get color on the lid prior to opening the pad.  Once open, just pick up the ink with aqua painter and off you go.  Your first couple of strokes will be darker so you’ll want to start where you want the darker color and then work your way out from there.  At least that’s the way I’ve been doing it, let’s see if I say the same thing after my class.

So – I’ve taken my first class.  We learned 4 techniques very quickly, and then she said ok, now you can paint a picture.  She gave us a color photocopy of a painting and had us copy it.  I would share mine, but it seriously looks like a preschooler did it.  But I’m glad for the techniques, I’ve applied two of them on the card I’m sharing today.

First, let me explain how I got the colors.  I used white watercolor paint and added reinker to it to get the colors.  You can use the ink pads, but I wanted to try this and see if it would work (and it did!).  After I got the shade I wanted, I then took a little bit of the paint and watered it down so that it was very thin, just a little thicker than plain water.

I used watercolor paper and stamped the images with Staz-On.  I then wet the entire sheet with a wet brush and painted the background colors.  I used a large brush and just washed the color on the paper.  I used Dapper Denim on the bottom of the page and Mint Macaron on the top, letting them blend a little in the middle.  I then dried the paper with a heat gun (don’t hold it too close or too long).  After the paper was dry I painted the coral and fish.  Because the paper was dry the color did not bleed outside the lines.

This card was a lot of fun to create.  I can’t wait to learn more techniques in next week’s class and share them with all my Stampin’ Friends