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.
