Water, water(colour) everywhere!

Julia's challenge for the CHF Challenge Chicks this week was "watercolour". Now I love my Prismacolour pencils and my Copics but sometimes it's nice to break out a brush and bring out the arteest, right? So I decided to watercolour an image rather than doing a resist or wash or whatever. I was in a painterly kind of mood so I used my inkpads rather than pencils. If you don't already know the trick - just squeeze your ink pad before opening so that the lid touches the pad and you'll have a little pool of ink in the lid that you can pick up with a brush and use for colouring.

I needed to make a birthday card for a friend/colleague of DH's who is one of those men without an obvious hobby to theme a card around. I thought this new creature (more of that later!) from the Saturday Evening Post line would make a great general purpose masculine kind of card! He's fabulous to watercolour as the body is a solid silhouette style which means you're not colouring in an outline, you're spreading out the ink that's already there - I stamped in Latte and added shading later with Espresso.

Because the image is big and I wanted it to take centre stage, I kept everything else very simple with just some stamped texture on the dark brown layer and some linen thread to whip stitch down one side of the panel.

I love the history behind these stamps - this one originally appeared as a cover for the Saturday Evening Post in November 1902. The artist, Charles Livingstone Bull, called this "The Elk" and therein lies the story behind my earlier reference to this as a "creature". You might have to be a keen naturalist to know but it's not really an elk, it's a caribou (wild reindeer). An elk has the darker area around the neck and a lighter body, the caribou is the other way around. The antlers are a bit different, too. Natural history as well as stamping, huh? lol!

Stamps:
Elk/caribou (Saturday Evening Post line at CHF - releasing Friday 12th December)
Weathered Wood backgrounder
Sentiment made up from Silhouette Blooms I (Kim Hughes Collection) and So Happy (Rummage Bin line)

Paper:
140lb hot press watercolour
Suede Brown dark (Prism)

Ink:
Adirondack dye ink by Ranger (Espresso, Latte, Cloudy Blue, Stonewashed)
Tim Holtz Distress by Ranger (Peeled Paint, Shabby Shutters, Antique Linen)

Other:
Linen thread

Thanks for stopping by today, I appreciate you taking the time! If you'd like to see what everyone else has been up to with watercolour, here are the links for the ladies playing along today:

Julia - Kim - Dawn - Michele - Jennifer - Sherrie