Dragonfly Days

When I went to the training day with Kuretake they kindly gave me some of their 12 x 12 white paper to play with. This has a finish almost like water colour paper so I decided to use it to make the same effects that you can get with regular watercolour paper and at a fraction of the cost as well.

I started by cutting out a piece of the paper to the size that I wanted. It doesn't matter if it's too big as it can be trimmed later on.

I put the paper on a piece of cling film to protect my work surface and used an old watercolour brush to wet the paper thoroughly. This is because I wanted to do something which is called wet-into-wet. Don't worry about the technicalities. You only want to know that it works.

When the paper was wet I touched the surface with two of the pinks that are shown in the photograph. They are the TUT 80 Art and Graphic pens 202 and 20. If the paper is wet enough the colour should spread over the surface of the paper. If it remains too close to the point where you touched the paper is too dry. Wet it again and add more colour. You want a soft mottled effect.

Now put the paper aside to dry.

You are probably thinking that it looks nothing at the moment and you might even be right but you don’t want the surface to be full of colour as it will mean that the stamping will not show up well later on.

When it's dry you can use the narrow end of the pen to draw some swirls and then ink up a small stamp, I used a dragonfly in this instance and I stamped over the base paper as seen. I used both pinks to ink up the stamp.

I then cut a length of white grosgrain and stuck it to the front of the paper. The paper was then stuck to the front of a base card.

I then stamped a large dragonfly on to pink card and embossed it with a silvery white embossing powder. I cut out the dragonfly.

I stamped the message on a piece of white card and mounted it onto pink card which I then trimmed to leave a narrow border. I Used 3d foam pads to stick the message to the front of the card as shown.

I stuck the dragonfly to the card with 3d foam pads and the card was finished.