Watercolor card with Kuretake Starry Colors

Hello, I have a quick and beautiful card that takes longer to paint than to stamp. I love how simple and beautiful this card came to be! This technique is also used to for wet-into-wet. Angela Fehr has a great class on how to make the watercolor background, check it out! You can thank me later her class is awesome!

Or if you are new to watercolor This tutorial is a good one too... Here is a great tutorial on a wet-into-wet technique by one of my favorite youtube channels



I used a yellow and a pink pigment from Gansai Tambi 36 set, and then I added some of the gold starry colors to the yellow watercolors, once you get the yellow mixed (so I used three colors essentially, a pink, yellow, and a gold and the same yellow and mixed them together to create three hues.)

Then for the playing I mean painting: I got my size 14 round brush out and got a juicy brush full of pink, I wanted the pink to be as vibrant as possible, onto a wet/semi gloss saturated with water I lightly brushed my brush into spots that I wanted pink, I wasn't thinking much about where just where I felt needed some pink, then I added the yellow, the same process, if I like the idea of having yellow I painted some yellow down then I added the starry color mix into the paper. Then I played a little bit, DO NOT OVER WORK THE PAINT, the whole idea of this is to make it look loose and free.  Then let it dry overnight, or at least a good hour, you want the paper to bone dry before stamping on it.

Now it's time to get out your MISTI and your outline stamps, (a simple outline stamp will work wonders for this card)  I used Tim Holtz Flower Garden Stamp, and stamp it in black archival ink, mount the watercolor paper onto a card base and I called it done.

My simple design tip: I always like to choose colors that I know will blend well, so usually, analogous colors are my favorite to do for wet-into-wet washes, or for Verigrated washes, that way I don't have to worry too much about mud. If I need a splash of color I wait till after the wet-into-wet part of the paper is dry and go in and do a glaze with a different color, but I like to keep things simple and elegant, so I don't usually do that, but for this card, if I thought I needed green I could have gone back in and added green to the leaves if needed. I felt like the colors were perfect the way there were and I didn't want to chance to lose that feel, which is always the hardest thing an artist has to figure out.

Enjoy your Fourth of July, and Happy Creating!


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