blankety blank blank: Watercoloring your diecuts

Sep 24 2011

Watercoloring your cuts

Hello Circlets! Kristen here with a fabulous fun post on watercolors. Now, I love the paints, but I love the pencils more. With watercolor pencils, you can add beautiful color to your paper and create the most unique and gorgeous diecuts, without overloading your paper and causing the paper to fray or tear.
First things first, you have to choose what you will be coloring. I chose to go with the season, and wanted a fall layout to create leaves for. I think this is a perfect technique for the season, what until you see the fall leaves I have created.
Because it’s fall, I wanted to create a big pile of leaves on my layout. I kept the layout on the simple side, to focus on my photos and the leaf embellishments.

I first cut out oak and maple leaves in two colors of cardstock, a plain white and a light yellow. Then I sprayed my leaf with a water spray and layered on my colors , first putting green or lime in the center, then adding yellow around that, then orange and red on the outside of the leaf. Some of the colors mixed up, and some of them stayed where I colored them. To get a very dark color on your leaf, add a bit of water directly to the tip of the pencil, which will soften the color lead and create a darker color. I allowed these to dry just a moment, then I flicked some nice brown spray mist on them. I also experimented and tried flicking the brown mist on when they were dry, which was a nice result too.

After the leaves were dry, I crumpled them and let them completely dry overnight. Then I set about creating my layout.
I used a large stamp cut out that I cut twice in yellow stripe and yellow flower print. Then I cut the diecuts in half and layered them onto dark brown cardstock. I trimmed off the cardstock and added a strip of red stripe paper across both sides of the layout. I machine stitched right along the edges of the stamp edges.

After I trimmed out my photos with orange and dark brown paper, I added my photos and began layering on the leaves. I just added them until I liked the mix of colors and shapes then machine stitched over them to make sure they all stayed in place. For this stitching I moved the paper up and down in a line to create movement across the paper.

Finally I added a couple buttons tied with twine, and cut out the title to finish my layout. For this layout I opted not to journal, because I felt the photos and title said all I wanted to say. I hope you’ll try this watercolor technique on your fall leaves and see the beauty you can create!