Simple Watercolored Christmas Card & A Sale

Hello my friends! Today I wanted to share a card I am submitting for the Paper Craft Crew Challenge#400. This is a tic-tac-toe challenge and I am going to choose the three diagonal blocks: Favorite Colors (Greens & Teals), Seasonal (Christmas) and Natural Element (Trees).

And, once again, I am submitting to NBUS, too! Don't you just love to use items from your stash?

The process itself is a very simple. It begins with a 5" X 6" (cut from a 9" X 12" piece) piece of Arteza Expert WaterColor Paper taped to a hard board with Yellow Frog Tape. For the paints, I used Kuretake - Gansai Tambi paints. They are vibrant, creamy paints which can be very opaque for watercolor.

To prep the dry watercolor pans of paint, a few drops of water are dropped in with a pipette or you could use a dropper. Next, I simply wet the entire piece using a 1" paint brush and clean water. To paint the background I did a horizontal stroke with Teals, Greens and Black blending them where they meet. While still wet, I tipped the hard board different ways so the the colors would run dark into light.

I felt that the middle value of greens look like trees and the jade area seemed to have clouds. That is the beauty of watercolor - just let is flow and see what you get! Once total dry, I cut with one of my Kat Scrappiness Rectangle Dies. If you want a really good basic set of rectangle dies, at a very reasonable price, these are perfect. The smallest die does a great job on sentiments and with any 2 you can easily create any size frame you wish.

Before heat embossing the sentiment, I sprinkled embossing powder over the panel to be sure it was dry. It was, but it was a little warped. So here is a trick I heard about lately (Jennifer McGuire?) and it worked perfectly. 

I have had a laminator in my stash for a long time and never used it-NBUS! It is a Heidi Swapp Minc Machine used for foiling. But the cool thing is - you can put your warped card panel in the carrier sheet (or between a folded sheet of copy paper) and run it through the machine. I set it to a heat setting of "3". It's like ironing the panel and straightens it out perfectly!

Then I white heat embossed a wonderful sentiment, Peace On Earth, from a Fun Stampers Journey (FSJ) set called It's Cold Outside. To be honest, I bought this set just because I loved the font, but the little characters are so cute, too, I am looking forward to coloring them. Just look at that sweet little deer!

Spellbinders/FSJ is offering a good sale now through Nov. 8, 2020:

To finish, I popped up the watercolor panel with foam tape onto a card base of Neenah 100lb. Classic Crest Cardstock.

That's it. I stamped the Merry Christmas from the same set inside with Altenew Obsidian Black Ink and called it a day. No glitter, no glaze, no splatter and no embellishment of any kind and I love it!

If you haven't tried watercolor, give this a try. Use YOUR favorite colors, tip the board and see what wonderful results you'll get. Thank you to the Paper Craft Crew and NBUS for these fun, creative challenges.

*Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.