How to Create a Watercolor Pumpkin Card

I love the look of watercolor on cards, but I'm not that great at watercolor painting.  However, I am really good at watercolor stamping!  There are two keys to being successful with this technique...using watercolor paper and solid stamps!

I began by cutting my watercolor paper to 4 x 5.25 so I could use it on a card front if that was how I thought it would work best (in the end, I decided to die cut postage images with it).

I reached back deep in my retired stash for the Fall Fest stamp set.  It has some great solid images of pumpkins on it. To do this technique you need to:

1) Place your stamp on your block.

2) Gather a few colors of orange. Ink spots work best, but you can use the larger stamp pads as well. I inked   my lightest color first, Crushed Curry, then added some Pumpkin Pie and Cajun Craze inks around the yellow.  

3) Lightly spritz your inked stamp with a mist of water from the small spritzer bottle and allow the water to blend the colors, then stamp your pumpkin image on the watercolor paper.  It won't look so good at first, but give it time to dissolve into the paper and dry.  It always looks better when dry!  

4) I usually spritz it again and get another image before adding the ink again.

5) Allow the images to dry before using them. They can be fussy cut out or used as a background.  I stamped an A2 panel and two pages of the pumpkins so I would have plenty to create with. I also stamped some leaves using this same technique but with Old Olive and Garden Green inks.

I used second generation stamping on my panel to lightly stamp some text from the Elements of Text stamp set for more texture. I also did this to one of the pumpkins I fussy cut out.

I used a postage die to cut out the images and was ready to assemble my card.

I used an A2 Very Vanilla card base and a panel cut from retired Copper Clay card stock. I ran the panel through the Stamp, Cut and Emboss machine using the Gathering Leaves embossing folder.

I cut a banner die from the Stylish Shapes dies and stamped "Many Thanks" from the Gather Moments stamp set in Copper Clay ink.  Then I wrapped some twine around one of the postal images and tied a bow,

I arranged the images as shown and adhered them to the card front. The long postal image and the pumpkin are adhered with dimensionals. To finish off the card, I added some glossy enamel dots.