TGIF – Winter Sketches Watercolor with Norine

It’s TGIF time! What a crazy week. It kind of felt like we had two Mondays this week, didn’t it? But it’s Friday for real this time. I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!

Norine is here today with a gorgeous TGIF project using the Winter Sketches set. Let’s hear all about it…

Hello Greetery Friends!  Have you finally got your feet up?  The wrapping paper picked up?  Hopefully, Christmas dinner leftovers will take care of everyone for a little while longer and you can schedule some creative time for yourself!  This week’s project is a thank you card that will serve perfectly for the current season, but translates well to other occasions, even a sympathy card.

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I’m drawn to muted colors with the Winter Sketches stamp set so for today’s card I indulged that by creating a watercolored background of blues, greens and browns.   Because I used a lot of water, the colors blended to the point where you can hardly distinguish what colors were used.  Getting color mixes like that is easy when you never clean the lid of your watercolor paint palette.  It used to be a matter of laziness, until I realized that was where the most beautiful “non-colors” were born.

After a few attempts to stamp first and watercolor second, I decided that that order of the process dulled the ink lines more than I liked.  So using the stamp panel discards as a guide I painted the color to approximately fill the background of my stamped design.  Once the paint was dry, I stamped two of the pine needle outline images from the Winter Sketches set using shade of blue ink and the rough sketchy tree limb with a combination of kraft and dark grey inks.

Using more of the leftover blue, green and brown paints on my palette, I painted in the pods on the pine needle images, connected the branch limbs where I wasn’t stamping the additional layers to the branch, extended some branches and very lightly added the suggestion of more leaves to the ends of the branches.  After allowing that to dry, I splattered the card panel with more blue paint as well as some white gouache paint, thinned with water to splattering consistency.  Then I added a sentiment from the Sentiment Suite Thank You stamp set, stamping with Versamark ink and heat embossing with platinum embossing powder.  

I paired the stamped and painted part of the card panel with a strip of plaid patterned paper from my stash along the bottom.  I wrapped the card panel with a strand each of brown fiber cord and shiny platinum floss, opted for a knot over a bow so it wouldn’t distract too much from the stamped design, and adhered everything to a cream colored cardstock card base.  This card went together really fast (except for the time waiting for paint to dry, when I picked up my current felt appliqué project to stitch on), and was super simple and easy to create!

Thanks for stopping by today and I hope you get a chance to play over the next few days!