Simon Hurley Create. // 3 Watercolor Cards with Re-Inkers

Hello! I love watercoloring and I decided to try something new to me! Watercoloring with Simon Hurley create. dye ink re-inkers!

The Flower Picking Friends stamp set is one of the newest Simon Hurley create. stamps and I just love it! I love that the large floral images can be used to create elegant designs or you can add in the tiny critters and create cute cards, too! I decided to go clean, simple, and elegant! I stamped each of the large flower images onto watercolor cardstock with black pigment ink and then heat embossed them with clear powder. The clear heat embossing helps me stay inside the lines when I watercolor. It's a little trick I always use!

I used the same technique to color all three cards - I just mixed up the colors a bit! I used two cups of water - one for cleaning my brush and one I kept clean and clear. I needed clean water because I like to color wet on wet when I'm coloring with liquid watercolors. I also dropped 2 or 3 drops of each reinker onto a palette. The reinkers were a little thicker than traditional liquid watercolors, but I treated them the same way. I used a small brush and added a layer of clean water to the portion I wanted to color and then dipped just the tip of the brush into the reinker and added color to the image.

The resulting color is so rich and vibrant because the reinkers are so pigmented and concentrated. It's a gorgeous look! And you can add water to the reinkers to water down the colors and get a variety of shades! I used Over the Moon, Slippery When Wet, and Grrr! for the yellow flower, Clear Skies for the blue flower, and Bee Sting for the red flower. I colored all of the leaves and stems with Overzealous - a perfect Spring green color! I still managed to color outside the lines even with the heat embossed barrier on the images. Oh well ... it happens! Haha! To cover up my mistakes I watered down some Minty Fresh reinker and painted a thin outline around each of the flowers. This really helps them pop off the page! For more texture I decided to add flicks of black watercolor over each panel.

I heat embossed three different sentiments from the Flower Picking Friends stamp set with white embossing powder on black cardstock. I trimmed them into banners and added them with foam tape at the bottom of each stem. I love how simple and elegant this trio of cards turned out!