Krafty Tips & Tutes: Technique for a Watercolored Look

Hello Everyone!

Krafty Girl, Lee Ann here, back with a tutorial, creating a watercolor look around an embossed sentiment.

Are you loving the amazing new sentiment set, Spook-tacular Sentiments?  The sentiment 

stamps are perfect for the technique I am going to show you today. This would work

beautifully with the Summer Sentiments as well, or any other of Becky's sets. 

1.  To start, stamp your sentiment with Versamark ink and emboss with clear embossing powder. I used mixed media paper; you can use watercolor paper as well.  I like using mixed media paper as it

gives me a more spotted look.  

To add color, you will be applying ink to a kraft mat and spritzing it with water.  

2.  I selected these colors to work with.  You do not have to use Distress Inks but they do work nicely as they react with water even after drying. 

3.  Once you have chosen your colors (it can be one, two, three, or four as above, or it can be monochromatic using multiple colors in the same family), you are going to smudge some ink

 onto a craft mat.  I started with just 2 colors, the Scattered Straw and orange inks.  If you are using 

more than one ink at a time, start with the lighter of the to inks to prevent contaminating it with 

the other color(s). 

4.  Using a spray bottle or mister, spritz the ink until you get tiny water droplets, as I tried to show you below.  

5.  Now the fun begins.  Put your  embossed panel into the ink, embossed side down.  You can

just set it into the ink and press, you can drag it through the ink, you can smoosh it around a bit.  

This is what mine looked like while still wet after the initial dip into ink. 

 

6.  This is what it looked like after being dried with a heat gun.

7.  Wipe your mat off and add more ink.  Spritz with water.  I used Scattered Straw and orange 

again. 

8.  Here it is dry.

  

9.  Aside from achieving a look you like, the goal is to add enough color around the sentiment 

to make it stand out.  Here I started adding a darker color, the Ripe Persimmon.

10.  My darkest color, the purple, was the last color I added.  

11.  After a couple of layers of purple, I went on to another techique, the Iron Off Embossing

technique.  

Place your dry panel on a towel.  Heat up your craft iron. 

12.  Using plain white paper ( I used printer paper), place it over the embossed area.  

Iron over the paper to heat up the embossing powder.  The embossing powder with start to 

stick to the white paper.  This is what it will look like as you remove the embossing.  

 You will have to do this several times to remove all of the embossing.  You are left with a perfectly white sentiment!

To finish, I added hand drawn doodle lines and matted it with designer paper. 

This is a great technique to make the sentiment shine.  Here is a monochromatic take on this

technique, using the Summer Sentiments Set~ 

And another one using the Spook-tacular Sentiments~

No two are alike and there is no wrong!  I hope you give this fun technique a try!  

Lee Ann  :)

***WIN!!!!***What a fabulous tutorial by Lee Ann!  I'm totally going to give that a try!!  Kimmie here and I was wondering.....who would like to WIN a new set of the 

SPOOK-TACULAR SENTIMENTS??!!!

All you have to do is leave a comment on THIS blog post, tell me how YOU would use this fabulous sentiment set and I'll choose a winner next Sunday!!!  Good luck