Gracias en acuarelas Archives

I had previously made a spanish thank you card using the Gracias En Acuarelas stamp set which is equivalent to the Watercolor Thank you set. It occurred to me that the April image from the Stampin’ Up! Perpetual Birthday Calendar stamp set would make a good background for this. To begin with, I tried making a card with an extra layer but eventually realised that watercolor and layers don’t really make sense. One is fun and not precise and the other is very precise. Don’t you agree?

The imprecise splodge is the “April” image from the Perpetual Birthday Calendar set and I stamped it in pool party on very vanilla. I originally tried whisper white but in its stark white-edness, it seemed to have too much precision also. Or maybe I just haven’t had enough sleep. Anyway, I then stamped the gracias image in lost lagoon – I do much prefer lost lagoon on very vanilla instead of whisper white actually. I then mounted this piece on a base of lost lagoon. The envelope is lined in lost lagoon from, yes, you guessed it, the backgrounds DSP from the incolor 2014 pack.

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.