Flourishes Focus: Watercolor Made Easy!

It's Friday... which means it's time for another Flourishes Focus. Julie Koerber here! I wanted to share with you one of my favorite "cheat" techniques. It's a technique I use to create soft images that look watercolored without a lot of work!

Here's what you'll need to get started....

• European Watercolor Paper
• Dye based in a couple shades of the same color
• Water brush filled with water
• Signs of Spring (or your favorite Flourishes set!)
• Paper towel

To start, I inked up my large daffodill with the light yellow and light green ink, going over my image a second time and just "thumping" the darker yellow and darker green randomly to create some shaded areas on my image. It's random! Just don't do too much or you won't get the color variation from light to dark.

This is what the image looks like after you stamp....
The next step is easy! Within a few minutes while the ink is still soaking into the watercolor paper, you want to run your clean and damp waterbrush over your image making sure to clean off your brush when you move from color to color.

See?
After you are done, this is what your image should look like! You can see, I drew the color in and didn't color evenly. I wanted the color to be darker in some areas -- just like you do when you really DO watercolor! It gives your stamped work depth with ease!
The next step is a watercolor wash so that your image doesn't just "float." You'll want to start by wetting the paper around your image. This is how the color will flow around your image.
Now, it's time to add your color. Pick any color that you think will compliment your image. I picked a baby blue. And, this is how I picked up my color - from the lid of one of my ink pads!
And, this is what my image looked like after I added my hue of blue..
The next part is simply putting my card creation together and... VOILA!
I used my oval and scalloped oval Nestabilities, the Vintage Wallpaper background stamp on my card base, some Kaiser rhinestones, sheer olive ribbon, a tag to stamp my "daffodils" word on and some decorative paper from both the Basic Grey Urban Prairie and Memory Box Rhubarb Tart collections.

Before I go, I wanted to show you a few of the cards I made over the past year using this technique!

And finally, on this one, I used the watercolor wash and also stamped the grass and flowers below my swinging lady and then used my water brush to blend the color.
Be sure to stop by these fabulous Flourishes designers to see what kind of easy watercolor creations they cooked up this week!

Christine Okken
Faith Hofrichter
Laura Fredrickson
Leslie Miller
Stacy Morgan

I hope you enjoyed my watercoloring made easy tutorial! I also hope you give it a try!

~Julie