Kitty Bee Designs’ Aloha Friday Challenge #109

Hello! Today I’m with Kitty Bee Designs’ Aloha Friday Challenge #109, the last for 2017. Hasn’t this year just flown by?

I hadn’t done any watercoloring lately so I thought I’d print this gorgeous outline image, called Christmas Post from All Dressed Up and try out my Kuretake Zig Clean Color Brush Pens on some recently purchased generic watercolor paper. I was really surprised with this paper’s quality, the water and paint sat on the surface long enough to blend beautifully.

I’ve bought quite a few brands of watercolor paper recently, trying to find a paper that suited my style and that was thin enough to feed through the printer easily. While most papers would go through the printer ok, I found most are highly absorbant and wouldn’t allow me to blend my Zig pens properly, or at least to my satisfaction. I was really disappointed with these papers and didn’t think I was going to be able to work with my Zig pens on any digital images. I decided to chance more money on a block of Chinese generic watercolor paper and got exactly what I was after. This paper was only thin, about 100gsm and needed to be stretched slightly as it was taped down (with painter’s tape) but the way it resisted the water long enough to allow blending was just perfect for me. Now, I have to work out what to do with all the other papers I bought.

Back to the card, I colored the main image and filled in the fine detail on the post box with a black fineliner pen and a White Sakura Gelly Roll pen.

I decided to get a little creative with the background and use a resist technique to emulate snow. I didn’t really want to use masking fluid and wait ages for it to dry so I used a Sakura Clear Glaze Gelly Roll pen to draw dots to imitate falling snow and draw some small patches of snow on the ground. I allowed it to dry for a minute or two and went back to painting my background and the pen resisted the watercolor perfectly. The pen isn’t removable, but I didn’t mind that, I was left with a glossy finish to all of my snow areas. I didn’t need to consider adding any finishes to the snow areas, it was already done!

Once the paper had dried fully, I simply trimmed it down with Sue Wilson’s Noble Pierced Rectangles die set and mounted onto a slightly larger piece of black cardstock, using a tape runner. I didn’t want to use any wet glue, in case it affected my watercolored image in some way. I glued both panels, this time using a wet PVA glue on the back of the black card, onto a cream 5″×7″ card base.

To finish off, I used a silver peel off greeting sticker, applying it to the top corner, to help balance the image and its surroundings. I didn’t add any more bling as I wanted the focus to be on the watercolor. I think this pretty image works well enough on its own, don’t you?

Thanks so much for spending time with me today. I look forward to next time…😊