Watercolor Roses

Hi there! Today I’m sharing a card I made for my mom for Mother’s Day. This was my first attempt at a watercolor effect and it was very simple using Zig Clean Color Real Watercolor brush pens. I purchased a set of the pens on Amazon and just a word of advice- you don’t need the full set of 80 pens. I used 4 pens on this card and probably could have achieved nearly the same results with just 3 pens due to their fantastic blending ability.

These pens work best on watercolor paper, so I used Strathmore cold press and cut the piece slightly larger than the 5″ x 7″ card base. Cutting it a bit larger allowed me to tape the edges of the piece down while I was coloring the images and prevented any pooling of water underneath and smearing that might occur.

If you’re new to watercoloring, you may find that embossing the images as I’ve done on this card makes the coloring process really easy and helps to keep the color from bleeding outside of the image. I used the Stampendous “Rose Bouquet” cling stamp set and began by stamping the large rose towards the bottom left corner of the paper in versamark ink using the MISTI. I then heat embossed the rose using a detail white embossing powder.

Next, I stamped the small rose and leaf image towards the top center of the piece and embossed. I was then ready for a little masking. With masking, you want to determine which image(s) you want to appear in the forefront. This is the image you will mask in order to create the depth and dimension with secondary images. I wanted the medium size rose in the middle to appear as though it was under the other roses, so I stamped the large and small roses on eclipse tape, cut them out and masked those two images.

I then positioned the middle rose between them with the help of the MISTI and embossed as I did with the other roses. While I had the large rose masked, I also stamped the large leaves to the bottom of the rose and embossed. Now we’re ready to color our images. For the roses, I used just the Pink Flamingo pen along the outside edge of each petal and blended it out with a detail water brush. For the leaves I used the Mid Green pen along the edges, blended out with the water brush and went back with the Deep Green pen in a few areas along the veins of the leaves. I barely blended the Deep Green with the water brush. Just enough to soften the edges.

To finish it up, I used the Warm Gray 2 pen in small circular motions along the edges of the embossed images, and a small area in the center to ground my sentiment (this is a Stampin’ Up! stamp). I went back over the gray with a water brush using larger circular motions to blend the color out.

I trimmed the watercolor paper to 4 7/8″ x 6 7/8″ and then decided I wanted that soft gray around the outside edges of the piece, so I repeated the same process used above.

I hope all moms had a wonderful Mother’s Day yesterday and I hope you enjoyed this card. Thanks for stopping by!