Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Watercolour Resist?



I'm not sure what to call this technique - I can't find anything similar on SCS, so I am going to christen it, Watercolour Resist. As I mentioned yesterday, it's a technique I saw at a wonderful stamp store in London called Stamp Art. The card looked stunning even from a distance, and immediately got me curious as to how the effect was achieved. So I picked it up and studied it LOL!

To do this technique, you will need:

- watercolour paper (SU! makes a wonderful version, nice and thick so it can absorb a lot of water without getting warped)

- VersaMark ink

- white embossing powder

- embossing gun

- aquapainter

- classic (dye-based) inkpads and/or reinkers

- line image stamp

For this card I used the Wonderful You stamp set - LOVE the images in this set! First, stamp your image using VersaMark ink onto the watercolour paper. Then emboss using white embossing powder. It will be difficult to see what you are doing when you are stamping your image(s), and you need to work relatively fast or your ink is going to dry and your embossing powder is not going to stick very well. Once the image is embossed, watercolour using your aquapainter and dye-based ink. This card was for this week's Colour Challenge, and uses Elegant Eggplant and Taken with Teal (Old Olive was the third colour, but I did not use it to colour my image). I find that, to get a nice watercolour look to your project, it helps if you slightly wet the area you are going to 'paint' before you apply colour to it. What you'll find with this technique (which also strongly reminds me of silk-painting - which I did quite a bit of years ago), is that the embossed outline will retain much of your colour within the space inside your outline. So what you'll find is that the white outline stands out and blocks out the various 'zones' of your images. Doesn't that look cool? Here is a close-up of one of the flowers:




This card also fulfils this week's Sketch Challenge - which I was THRILLED to see, because it suited this technique perfectly, leaving me with a big panel to stamp and paint (this is really the only suitable stamp I had for this technique and it is quite a large image LOL).
As always, thanks for looking, and Happy Stampin'!

A-M

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