Solid stamp watercoloring (with mini-tutorial)

I had so much fun with the featured stamper challenge on SCS today. We were to CASE Jodi, aka Kharmagirl, who has an amazing gallery. I chose this card as my starting point.

I kept the layout of Jodi's card and also the blue bayou and wild wasabi, but I used groovy guava instead of barely banana. The wasabi floral panel is from the Afternoon Tea collection in the mini catalog. Such pretty papers in that set! I used the Watercolor Vines wheel for the background (blue bayou ink and cardstock), edged everything in blue bayou ink, and made my own word window punch for the sentiment (Savvy Stamps).

I wanted to have my main flower image look watercolored, but I needed to use the solid stamp from Live Your Dream - so I played around with how to achieve that and I think I may have hit on something new. At least I've never seen it anywhere that I know of, but correct me if I'm wrong! It's really just a combination of some other watercoloring and stamping techniques. I'm calling it solid stamp watercoloring, for lack of something more imaginative. Feel free to suggest something better, LOL!

Basically what I did was this:

1. Color solid stamp image with markers (or in my case, blender pen colored with reinkers, since I was using the In Colors).

2. Lightly mist watercolor paper with water. You don't want it to be too wet, and you don't want any water drops that are so large that they will blur your image.

3. Huff on the stamp and press onto damp paper. Your image may look something like this:













4. Using a drop of reinker and Aqua Painter (or press ink onto the lid of your ink pad and pick up with Aqua Painter), color in the areas that didn't stamp evenly and shade as desired. Naturally when I tried this for the second time, it didn't come out as well as the first - I think with this you need to be prepared for some trial and error!