Mosaic Watercoloring

Happy Saturday! So glad it is the weekend… the best time of the week! :)

I have a fun watercoloring technique to share with you today, that is very easy to do, even for beginners.   The colors for my clean and simple card for today was inspired by the Color Throwdown’s current color challenge. I loved the mosaic heart in the inspiration photo, and thought it would be a lot of fun to create one for my card.

I began by sketching a heart shape with a pencil onto a piece of watercolor paper; you can also trace any heart shape you like, or stamp the outline with any heart stamp, but for this technique, I wanted to have a more “hand drawn” look to my heart, without any perfectly straight lines.

Once my image was traced, I went over the sketched lines with a black waterproof multiliner pen, and also drew in the horizontal and vertical lines to create my pattern within the heart.

Next came the watercoloring. I chose some Tim Holtz distress inks for my color medium; Peacock Feathers, Dusty Concord, Peeled Paint, Wild Honey and Broken China. I mixed the Wild Honey with just a bit of the Broken China, to create a more yellow-green tone. I randomly began coloring in all the squares inside my heart, letting each color dry before moving onto the next so that they did not bleed into each other.

Once my heart was watercolored and dried, I fussy cut it out, leaving a small border around it. I then covered the heart with a coat of Glossy Accents to add some dimension, as well as to help with the “mosaic” look.

While my heart was drying, I moved onto the rest of the card. On a cardstock panel, I stamped my sentiment in some black dye ink, using a stamps from the Penny Black “Hugs” set, as well as a stamp from a mini Studio G set I had in my stash.

Once dry, my heart was adhered to the panel with foam tape; the cardstock panel is layered on top of some green patterned paper and adhered to my card base with some more foam tape.

Because this is a clean and simple card, I kept the design very simple; to finish it off I wrapped a bit of purple twine around the bottom portion of the card and added some white faux stitching around the card base and the heart panel.

I really love how the heart is so loosely drawn; it creates a very artistic feel to the card, and adds a lot of character. I hope this has inspired you to add some hand drawn elements to your cards, and get creative with your sketching!

Happy Creating! :)

Challenges

This card is submitted into the Time Out Challenges #23 Valentine’s challenge, the CAS-ual Friday’s Must Love Watercolor challenge, the Color Throwdown challenge #327 and the Simon Says Stamp “Anything Goes” Wednesday Challenge.

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