Watercolour Pencils

Happy New Year! Thank you for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to join me here. All your comments are very much appreciated.

A very exciting development in the New Year is the arrival of Stampin' Up's new Watercolour pencils as a fabulous new colouring medium. At the moment there is a fairly limited palette of thirteen SU colours, but hopefully more will be introduced as time goes on. You can find them in the new Occasions catalogue which goes live on 4th January.

Having had a play with them over Christmas I am hooked! You can use them as colouring pencils or you can then create watercolour effects by going over your colouring with a Blender Pen or Aqua Painter. I tried with both, but my personal preference was the Aqua Painter. I initially worried that the Aqua Painter would be less controlled and envisaged too much water where I didn't want it, but it actually worked brilliantly.

I started off by colouring the gorgeous paper that is FREE during Saleabration with any order of £45. For the colourful version I used a mixture of Calypso Coral and Melon Mambo for the flowers (the pencils blend very easily) and Old Olive for the larger leaves. There is only one green available at the moment, so I first coloured the smaller leaves in Daffodil Delight and then went over them again with Bermuda Bay. I worked in small areas, colouring and then using the Aqua Painter. Of course the beauty of these new pencils is that you can add colour to your stamped images and I have a lot I want to try!

The second, more muted card uses the same paper but a more limited palette of just Early Expresso and Basic Grey. I also added some Wink of Stella to add a bit of glitter to the stamens.

You absolutely do not have to be some hot shot colourist to get amazing effects with these pencils. You can actually be very 'scribbly' and the Aqua Painter takes it all in its stride! I'm sure I'll be posting lots of coloured cards this year!

Finally here is a link to a great video from Shannon West where she shows you this great new product in action. These super pencils will be available from my website from the 4th January.

Happy colouring! April x

52 CCT Theme Challenge

Hello! At 52 Christmas Card Throwdown this week we have a theme challenge for you. Our hostess, Kaja has chosen Gifts as her theme.

I have used an old SU stamp set 'Wishing You' to create a little pile of gifts in Melon Mambo. The sentiment comes from 'Oh What Fun'. I've added some Dazzling Diamonds Glimmer Paper, a couple of enamel dots and some Melon Mambo ribbon to finish things off.

I hope you'll visit us at 52CCT and be inspired by the creations of the design team. Have a crafty weekend, April x

Xanthine

My first card of 2016! I was inspired by a playground visit to have a go at the Butterfly Challenge  The theme there is 'X is for Xanthine' - the yellow colouring found in some plants.

My butterfly is from SU's Watercolour Wings, stamped in Daffodil Delight, Summer Starfruit and Delightful Dijon. The patterned paper is from Basic Grey and was a snippet left over from making a tea light box. I stencilled the background with Daffodil Delight and added some yellow rhinestones - although they haven't shown up yellow at all!

It was nice to make a cheery, bright card on such a grey day (especially as we are in the rather stressful midst of homework left to the last possible day!) My flutterby is off to perch on Parsnip's head at Pixie's Snippets Playground. I hope his mum is having a rest after such a busy Christmas!

52 CCT Stash Challenge

Hello! Today the new challenge at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown is a stash challenge.

  

The reindeer with his array of baubles is a digi from A Day for Daisies. I've coloured him using Crumb Cake Blendabilities and for the baubles I used Spectrums. I've added some bling with some In-colour sequins. The sentiment is a Clearly Besotted stamp and the paper is Merry and Bright by Pinkpaislee. The cardstock is Melon Mambo and I also sponged the edges of the Starburst die-cut with Melon Mambo ink. I hope you like it! Please join us at 52 CCT and be inspired by the great cards made by the rest of the design team. April x

A Catty Challenge

 

This is my entry for CASE-ing the Catty Challenge #9 - a fab challenge where you use sections of the catalogue as the starting point for your own project. This week's section is the 'Thanks' part. I was inspired by the box on page 148. My version has Melon Mambo and Basic Grey flowers cut using Flower Fair Framelits and the background is Typeset dsp. I've taken the sentiment from Another Thank You, but I've made it using MDS, so I could shrink it down to a small tag. I hope you like it! April x