Firstly I’d like to thank Genny and the team at Hand Stamped Sentiments for selecting a card of mine as one of the Artist Picks for the colour challenge 205. You can see my card here.

I made a card for Gloria, my hostess in Barcelona, recently but just as I was about to write in it, I realised that I had Thanks on it in English. One of the sets that I’d added to my order with my Bingo winnings at the crop was the Stampin’ Up! Gracias en Acuarelas, the spanish version of Watercolor Thank you. I decided that it made sense to wait and use that one on a card for Gloria. I also challenged myself to look at my card stock and pull out a colour that I haven’t used lately. This turned out to be perfect plum. So I pulled out a piece of very vanilla and actually used my aqua painter. I think it’s the first time that I’ve ever used it with ink and then made a card with the result! Previously I’ve only used it to do the bokeh technique. I do have watercolour paper but I wanted very vanilla rather than whisper white so I tried not to get the paper too wet and it worked fairly successfully – presumably because there isn’t too much water colouring. I just squeezed the ink pad so as to get some ink onto the lid and quickly made the background. The colour coach suggested whisper white and early espresso to go with perfect plum so I adopted the early espresso part of it.

After allowing a little time to dry, I stamped the sentiment in early espresso. I added a tiny mat of early espresso, it’s just 1/8 inch larger than the very vanilla and left a large border of the perfect plum to pull it all together. I used snail to attach the very vanilla to the early espresso and a lot of it since the the very vanilla was no longer completely flat. I lined the envelope in the backgrounds DSP in perfect plum.