SUCCESS AT LAST!

My attempts at water coloring have been frustrating, to say the least.  That is UNTIL I discovered a delightful adult coloring book featured on Kristina Werner's blog.  The title is, ":Painterly Days, Flowers" by Kristi Rice and is available on Amazon.

After reading her tips and admiring the flowers and foliage on each page, I got out my water brush and three types of paints:  watercolor crayons, Peerless paints, and a set of pearlized paints.  I colored three flowers and the foliage on the first page of anemones just to see how they each differed.  I started with the crayon paints, which is what you see on this card and also turned out to be the best, in my opinion.

Starting at the top, I painted the flower and leaves with the pearlized paints.  Although my least favorite, these paints work nicely over other paints to give them a sheer pearly finish.  They also did not blend well.

Next, in the left bottom corner, is the Peerless sample.  This also did not blend well, which was surprising.  It could be the paper, a cheap brush or just my lack of experience.

However, the WC crayons (Lyra) blended nicely and was the most realistic of all three flowers.

As for the card itself, I had a lot of fun putting it together.  Using the WC crayons, I first painted the blossom, berries and leaves, cutting it down to a strip for the front of the card.  I mounted it on a piece of green cs, using the same cs for the "hello" die cut.   I found the butterfly in my stash, and it went perfectly with the orange flower center.  I gave it some shine with my Wink of Stella.  Before assembling the completed strip, I ran the card through the Big Shot with a floral ef to give it some texture.

Not wanting to waste anything left over, I made a second card with the scraps.  The bird was die cut from a scrap of marbled metallic paper and backed with the same gray paper as the greeting.

I can see that I'll be using this beautiful water coloring book a lot!