A Big Shimmery Bloom

Happy Artzy Wednesday everyone! Hope you’re enjoying some spring-like weather in your neck of the woods. It’s been in the upper 70’s here in Colorado. Loving that!

For my card today, I went with a CAS design, but I did break out my new Gansai Tambi Pearl water color palette. The palette has 6 colors: pink, orange (salmon), yellow, green, blue and white.

I’d tested these water colors on both dark and light colored paper to see which looked better. Not all pearlescent water colors work well on white or light colored paper so I always test my water color pallets on several different types of paper when I get them.

For this card, I decided to play with one of my favorite stamps from Dare 2B Artzy,  The Big Bloom flower. I stamped and heat embossed the Big Blooms stamp set onto some black 110 lb. cardstock with some copper embossing powder.  Note: I believe that they do make black water color paper but I couldn’t find it locally and had to improvise for my project.  If you’re going to use water colors however, it’s a good idea to use a heavy weight cardstock if you don’t have water color paper. For my project, I used minimal water and it worked fine, but if you were going to saturate your paper you’d want to test 110 lb cardstock first to make sure it would hold up with the water.

With my image embossed I was ready to add the water colors to it. Using an aqua brush I added a couple of drops of water directly to my pink and yellow water color palette. I mixed the water around with the color. I wasn’t sure how many coats of color I would need on the black cardstock so I started with a thin layer of the pink. I alternated pink on the petals with the yellow. I allowed the first coats to dry back a bit to see how transparent it was when dry. I ended up adding 2 additional coats, each a bit thicker to get a more rich color that wasn’t so transparent. The end result was a gorgeous shimmery color.  

I die cut the cardstock with my favorite scalloped square die.

Next, I die cut a scripty looking “hello” from some metallic gold paper. I glued two layers together to make the die cut work a bit more pronounced.  I added the final die cut at a slant on the front.

Finally I added some iridescent yellow sequins to the card front and the entire panel was added to a hot pink piece of cardstock and then glued down to a black cardstock card base. I also added a piece of the hot pink cardstock to the inside of the card so that I could write a message to the recipient.

Although my card today is pretty simple, I love how the shimmery water color looks on the Big Blooms flower against the black cardstock. It’s really difficult to capture how pretty it is in pictures, but it’s so gorgeous.

Thanks for stopping by today! Check out the Dare 2B Artzy store to get your own Big Bloom stamp or any of the other fun Dare 2B Artzy stamps, dies, paper or inks.