Valentine Watercolor Card

Welcome, today I spent the whole day creating this Valentine’s Day card. Unfortunately, yesterday, I decided to try casing the picture on an old cup box that I kept because I love the art style. Whew, I’m exhausted; not sure I’d do this again! However, it provided an excellent watercolor exercise for me. I created a prototype first to see if I could get achieve the look. The first pic trio below shows the 2 prototype steps on top and the art I was casing.

So, in creating this card, I used a bunch of Unity stamps from these kits: January 2018 Kit of the Month (KOTM), Love is Grand, February 2013 KOTM, Cherish Your Dreams, Boldly Believe, Beautiful Birthday Wishes, and We Treasure You. I basically used masking to layer stamps onto watercolor paper using different color archival inks. The masking templates were created by diecutting different size and shape tags to match the individual stamp sizes. As I layered the masks on top of each other, I used a pencil to create the pseudo-outline of the stamp “tags”. Then, once I removed the layers, I started painting each “tag” in 3 different colors and the bottom layer a darker color. I then had to create the shadows for each tag. Once done, I completely washed over the whole piece to mute and deepen the colors. Of course, there was a lot of hair dryer drying the paper between all of these steps.

The top layer was easier as I just stamped the heart, used some sentiment stamps to replicate the curlicues on the edge, stamped flowers, painted the outside of the heart and the flowers, and then used distress ink on the inside of the heart. Added stamped and colored flowers at the bottomed the heart.  I then stamped the sentiment and distressed it. Attached watercolor paper using scoretape to black cardstock and elevated that on a white card base. I also elevated top heart and added sequins and colored flower buds with gold spectrum noir glimmer pen. 

Here’s all the pictures! I’m pretty proud of the effort and effect produced, but I hope the card also turned out okay! Thanks for reading and have a great day!