Faux Watercolor technique!

We created these beautiful cards yesterday during my monthly Technique class.  We had a lot of fun!  Here's how we created the beautiful watercolor backgrounds:

VERTICAL CARD
1) Choose 3 ink colors (dye inks).  I used CTMH's lagoon, sweet leaf and juniper for these.

2) Spritz your regular white cardstock with water.  You want it fairly wet.  Your paper will start to bend.  Don't freak out!  That's normal.

3) With your darkest color, start to tap a sponge onto your ink pad and then lightly pouncing on your paper in sections.  You actually want the colors to be concentrated in specific sections.  Leave plenty of space for your other colors.

4) Repeat this with the next darkest color making sure to cover only the white areas of your paper (other sections than the other inked areas).  You may choose to blend into the other color a little, but your third color will be used for this.  Fill in most of the white space with this one.

5) With your final color (and lightest), sponge any white space and also rub the color into the others to blend.

LET DRY!! When it is:

1) Using a stamp with lots of open space (an outline stamp), ink it up with Versamark ink and stamp several times on paper.  Make sure to go off the paper so it looks like a print paper :).

2) Pour CLEAR embossing powder on, shake off excess and melt it using a heat gun.

3) Stamp with another stamp in Versamark ink.  I overlapped some of my stamped images.  Beautiful results :).

4) Pour WHITE embossing powder on, shake off excess and melt it using a heat gun.

After we did this, we decided to do it in reverse!!

HORIZONTAL CARD
1) Stamp with Versamark ink onto paper strip.

2) Pour CLEAR embossing powder on and melt with heat gun as mentioned above.

3) Spritz with water and sponge as described above.

This created totally different results!  The Horizontal card's embossing actually looks like it is debossed even though you can feel the texture popping up. Because we used clear embossing powder on the white paper, the color you see is white.

The Vertical card's clear embossing adds to the watercolor effect, because the paper was not white.  It was the inked background.  The white embossed images really popped out. 

We discovered that the images on the Horizontal card are more defined than the Vertical card.

Have fun playing with this technique!  I'd love to hear/see what you do with it :).

Thanks for joining me :).  Happy Crafting! -Dari