Thursday, December 10, 2015

Santa's Gifts

We are moving ever closer to the end of the year, and the end of the 2015 Holiday catalogue. Remember that many of the products in the catalogue are retiring and are only available while stocks last, so your chance to snap them up is growing smaller every day. Santa's Gifts is on that list, a very cute set that is great for watercolouring, like I did for the card I am sharing today:


Aw, look at that adorable reindeer... how can you say no to this guy? I still have a few sheets of the old watercolour paper floating around, so I used a full piece for this. I stamped Santa and the reindeer with Basic Black archival ink, then made a little mask for Santa's hand by stamping the image on a sticky note so that when it was cut out I had some of the sticky on the back and it would stay in place while I stamped the gift. Masking is such a nifty little technique! Once I had all of these stamped on the water colour paper I did a wash of Bermuda Bay in the background. Yep, all of that is Bermuda Bay. By using a lot of water and little ink I could achieve a nice pale colour. While I had the Bermuda Bay ink out I did the reindeer's scarf, using a lot less water and a lot more ink to get a more intense colour. For Santa's face I used Blushing Bride ink, which I left out of the colour combo graphic because... well it was such a small bit and doesn't stand out that much. For Santa's suit I used Rich Razzleberry. Such a lovely colour, and true to it's name - rich! It's a nice middle ground between the traitional red for Santa, and my favourite colour of purple. Santa's boots, and belt, along with the reindeer hooves, were done with Early Espresso - lots of ink and little water in the brush for those so the colour is so dark it is nearly black. The body of the reindeer is all Early Espresso. I know I have talked in the past about how brown shades in particular are made up of a mix of colours and tend to separate into these when you watercolour with them. I deliberately made use of that this time, the side taking on a warm reddish-brown tone and the face and inner ear a tan with a tinge of pink where I pulled the colour into areas where I already had a lot of water on the cardstock so the colour became quite diluted. To finish off the watercolouring, and for some real "pop" on the card, I used Tangelo Twist on the present.


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