Simplify, Breathe

Hello all!  Apparently July is World Watercolour month, so the new challenge theme at A Vintage Journey is well-timed.  The lovely Deb is our host, and she's in search of Watercolour Wonders.  You don't have to use actual watercolours, just any colour medium which is reactive with water... Distress Inks, pigment powders and so on.  All the details are over at A Vintage Journey, along with lots of inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides, so do check it out.  First of all, though, here's my watery offering for you.

Rather than watercolours, I used water-reactive Distress Inks for my backgrounds on these thistly tags.  But I am setting myself a daily watercolour challenge through July too, so keep an eye out for weekly (?) updates here.  I thought by saying it out loud to you here, that might encourage me to stick to it!  I love playing with watercolour, but I haven't done nearly enough of it lately.

You can see the wrinkle-free distress backgrounds in all their glory here in the early stages.

I think Faded Jeans, Broken China, Bundled Sage, Peeled Paint and Mowed Lawn are all in there somewhere, along with plenty of watery spritzing, smooshing and layering.






When I'm smooshing, I always work with multiple tags to make sure I'm using as much of the ink on the mat as humanly possible, so I ended up with a pair to work with this time.












I decided I'd play with this fabulous thistle stamp, one of Tracy Evans' designs for AALL & Create.  (I don't generally work with clear stamps - some of my earliest purchases were clear stamps and a couple have deteriorated quite badly - but there are some of Tracy's images which have proven simply irresistible!)














On one tag I embossed the image with Wow Bright White embossing powder.  And on the other I used my much-loved Earthtone Pepper, also by Wow.















The "watercolours" or watery inks are meant to be the highlight of these tags, so I didn't want to cover them up too much.












There's some fine twine wrapped around the lower end of the tags and I tied on a couple of Philosophy Tags which I altered with the same 
powders.













The one on the white thistle tag has a coating of the Pepper (I was relieved when the words continued to be visible - I hoped, but I wasn't sure!)...













... and the one on the pepper thistle tag has a coating of Bright White.  I deliberately roughened the edges before heating the powder so that some of the metal would show through.












I did a bit of extra stamping using just the text from the image to balance the tags.  It just wanted a bit more detail to the side of the main stamping.














The tags needed a little something more so I fished out some sequins and stuck them in various places.














The glossy embossing is already doing quite a good job of catching the light with that reflective dimensional surface.















But the sequins are of course especially designed to reflect light, and they do it so well!












I did a bit of doodling with my dip pen and white ink to create some frames around the edges, and the same fine twine finishes things off at the top of the tag.

And there's splatter in complementary colours too - some white spatter on the pepper thistle tag... and some grey/brown spatter on the white thistle tag.






So there you have it... some water and some colour and away you go.  I hope you'll be inspired to join us on A Vintage Journey some time this month with some Watercolour Wonders of your own.  Check out the inspiration over there too, and have a fabulous weekend.  Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll see you again soon.

Because watercolour actually moves on the paper, it is the most active of all mediums, almost a performance art.
Nita Engle

The theme over at Country View Crafts this month is Do More of What Makes You Happy, so I'd like to play along there.  Watercolouring makes me very happy, and I haven't done any in months.  In fact, any play time with inks and water makes me happy.  So I'm very happy that World Watercolour Month is going to make me spend more time doing just that!
At Crafty Cardmakers they would like us to Create Your Own Background - this is one of my favourite ways to do that