Look Ma - no lines!

I sent my mum some yellow freesias for Mother's Day and thought it would be nice to make a card that tied in with the theme. This lovely freesia stamp is an oldie from Cornish Heritage Farms and I thought I'd try something a bit different with it to see if I could get a genuine-looking watercolour result.

The no-line colouring technique (stamp in a very pale colour and use markers or pencils so that the lines don't show) works well for many stamps but this one is in the style of an etching and has quite a lot of shading lines so I didn't think the technique would work well for a transparent medium like watercolour. Instead, I stamped on scrap paper with black ink and then put the stamped image on a lightbox with a piece of Bristol Board over the top.

For those of us who can't really draw (so faint pencil is out of the question) this provides a great way of getting an image without having an outline that will show. I just left everything in place on the lightbox until I had enough colour on the paper to be confident of the shapes.

I also had a first play with some Kuretake Clean Color pens here. I have one Wink of Stella pen and (perhaps bizarrely since the glitter is supposedly what it's all about) have pretty much fixated on the brush nib! When I saw that Kuretake did watercolour pens with the same sort of nib I thought it would be fun to try a few.

I used Lemon Yellow to put down a base layer for the flowers but probably the biggest advantage was when it came to the background. The really fine point made it easier to get in to those fiddly spaces between the flowers with Light Blue.

The Kuretake colours played nicely with the Distress inks I used for the rest of the colouring and lifted to make highlights as a traditional watercolour would do (hopefully the detail shot will show that). So all in all, I'm pleased with those.





Stamps: Freesia and Mother's Day Centers (CHF, retired)

Ink: 
Brilliance by Tsukineko - Pearlescent Chocolate
Distress ink by Ranger - Mustard Seed, Wild Honey, Shabby Shutters, Peeled Paint

Other: 
Clean Color pens by Kuretake - Lemon Yellow, Light Blue
Artograph Light Tracer

Hope all the mums out there are having a lovely day and hugs to anyone missing their mum. Thanks for stopping by!