Happy Watercolored Birthday

Hi everyone.  Having some fun playing with watercolor paper.  Today I poured some drops and squiggles of re-inker in both Turquoise and Tangerine onto my craft sheet.  Misted some water and then placed my watercolor on top, letting it soak up all the beautiful color.  It's just a little different way of adding the ink to my paper.  I absolutely LOVE how this turned out.  The color combo is so pretty and I love the deep, saturated colors.  I thought it would be perfect with a black base, so switched up my usual white-on-white card base and front panel.  Perfect for a masculine birthday.

The black base is hard to photograph as it doesn't show the true, deep black it is in real life.  The dark black intensifies the turquoise and tangerine even more - I wish it photographed better for you to see.

I used the little leaves die-cut from Sizzix, just securing it at the base of the stem under the sentiment and also two leaves, and letting the rest of the leaves remain loose so the card has a bit of movement.  Originally I stamped the sentiment in black directly onto the the watercolored panel.  I lined up my Stamp-a-ma-jig so that I could stamp it twice as stamping on watercolor paper can be a bit tricky because of the texture.  For some reason I ended up with a shadow stamping on the second try and it was hard to read.  Not wanting to forgo using this pretty watercolor paper, I opted to stamp and emboss the sentiment onto a thin strip of black card stock to place over the mistake... I like it even better than my original idea. :)

I'm entering this into the CAS on Sunday challenge (#31 - birthday with die-cut) and this will also be my second entry for Addicted to Stamps & More #91 - Anything Goes.  I'm so going to add this to the current challenge at Less is More #168 - Makes me smile ... when I saw this challenge, I immediately thought I'd be making a cute and whimsical card to enter (and I may still do that), but this card makes me smile.  I love the artsy look of the ink splat background and the bright colors with the black to ground everything.

I have signed up for the next On-Line Card Class - Watercoloring, which begins on May 5th.  So looking forward to learning more tips and tricks for using this wonderful medium.

Quick note to my email subscribers.  For some reason Feedburner (the system that tracks and distributes the subscriptions) has had difficulties recently.  A few days back I noticed that approx. 200 of my subscriptions were deleted.  In talking to other crafters, they have had the same experience.  I apologize for any inconvenience and hope Feedburner fixes the problem soon.  xx

Edited to Add:  Just checking on Time Out Challenge (#3) and see that their current one is still open and it's about masculine birthdays ... so I'm entering!! :)

Stamps:  Bitty Birthday (SU!)
Paper:  Black, Watercolor
Ink:  Tempting Turquoise, Tangerine Tango (SU!); Versamark
Accessories & Tools:  Big Shot, Little Leaves die (Sizzix), white embossing powder, water mister

Challenges:
CAS on Sunday #31
ATS&M #91
Less is More #168
Time Out #3