By Card Making and Paper Crafts Contributor Heidi. Follow Heidi on Instagram @bluescallopcreations.
Bright watercolors that let you stay in the lines without heat embossing? Count me in! For today’s project, I wanted to try Nuvo’s Aqua Flow pens. They are basically highly pigmented liquid watercolors in an easy to use pen. The colors offered are so bold and bright, I definitely had to include flowers.
I love the look of bright blooms in simple square vases, so I used a floral stamp from Hampton Art with some simple square punches and dies. I started off by stamping 3 flowers on white cardstock using Versafine Onyx Black ink. This is a great black in for using with water colors because it does not smear. I used a heavier white cardstock instead of watercolor cardstock because I wanted a smooth finish.
Using a paint palette, I prepped the Apple Red and Spiced Ginger pens.
Then, I started working on the middle of each flower using Spiced Ginger.
I then continued to paint the rest of the flower Apple Red, adding a little water to blend up into the middle. It’s very easy to keep everything in the lines. You could add more water to get a lighter look, but I like the bold and bright look of the red.
After painting the flowers, and letting them dry, I cut them out with some small scissors. To create the “vase”, I punched a square from white cardstock and from some vellum using a 1 ¾” square punch and adhered the two together. The vellum is supposed to act as frosted glass for the vase.
To provide an area for the flowers to rest, I created a square mask using some scrap cardstock and a square die and placed it over a white notecard. I blended some Mermaid Lagoon Distress Oxide ink over the top of the mask with a large sponge dauber.
After removing the mask, I added a sentiment below the inked square using my stamp platform.
I adhered the vase and flowers with foam squares and added a few Red Berry Nuvo Drops around the sentiment.
I like how the coloring turned out with the more saturated watercolor pigments and the square of blue kind of pulling everything together. I found the pens very easy to work with and am excited to try different colors. Thanks so much for joining me today!