Watercolour Rose, Brayer Rose

At this week's class, we made two cards - they were both really fun, easy, and gave great results!  I focused on using tools from the back of the catalogue that many people overlook - the aquapainter and the brayer.

The first one, using the rose from Fifth Avenue Floral, was made using the technique shown here, on Patty's Stamping Spot blog:

In Patty's tutorial, she used shimmery white cardstock, which we don't have (yet).  It is in the new catalogue, and I'll be trying this technique out for sure!  In the meantime, I tried it with plain old Whisper White cardstock, and Watercolour paper - and it looked best on the Watercolour paper, hands down.

To do this technique, you need ink refillers in the colours of your choice, versamark or whisper white craft ink, white embossing powder, a heat gun (please don't try to heat emboss with a hairdrier!) and aquapainter (they come in packs of two for $19.95, which is a bargain) and a small water spritzer - I got mine from the travel section of the chemist.

To make these cards, I  first swiped the cardstock with my embossing buddy (this is a nifty tool that helps embossing powder stay where you want it to stay), stamped the rose in versamark on watercolour paper and then sprinkled white embossing powder over it, which I then melted with my heat gun.  That is the hard part - white on white is difficult to see!  Also, I tried this with clear embossing powder over versamark and it didn't turn out as well as when I used white embossing powder.

Next is the fun part - you spritz the stamped image with water until it pools over the image, then dip your aquapainter into a couple of drops of reinker (I used a saucer or a bit of plastic from packaging as a pallette)  and touch each "puddle" of water with it.  It is one of those techniques that is seriously fun to do, and impossible to mess up because the colours blend so easilly that if you don't like the intensity or shade on your image, you can keep working at it until you do.  It does take a while to dry however - you can blot parts of the wet image with paper towel, but you get lovely results when you let it dry naturally. The embossed lines resist the ink, so they stay white.

All the girls at Thursday's class loved this so much, they decided they would use this technique for everything!

The next one we tried used the gorgeous matching embossing folder Manhatten Flowers.

To make this, we simply ran a piece of Whisper White cardstock through the Big Shot in the folder, flipped it over so we were looking at the debossed (recessed) side, inked up the brayer (a brayer is exactly the same width as an ink pad.  How very convenient!)  and rolled it over the image until we were happy with the depth of colour achieved.  As you can see, it gived a striking result!

The card on the left here was made by running the brayer over the smooth side of the embossing folder itself, then running it through the Big Shot.  Cool, huh?  You can see they are mirror images.

I have made a couple of things with my preorder stamps so I'll be posting them during the week!  Tomorrow I'm making Father's Day Cards with my daughter's Prep class, so I'd better run so I can get them prepared ahead of time.

Happy stamping!