Today’s tutorial was presented by Ashlea Cornell.  She was demonstrating easy watercolour backgrounds.  when I do watercolour backgrounds, I always end up with twice as many backgrounds as I intended.  I just can’t wipe away all the luscious colour that is left on my media mat, so I just make another background.

I had a bit of a minor miracle happen today too.  The card I am posting today was teetering on the rim of the big round file, and then the miracle happened.  I wanted to use a mainly black image on the brightly painted stripes.  The stamp set I had in mind was Altenew’s Watercolour Half Tone set.  The problem was that I had painted the stripes on the very textured side of the watercolour paper.  I absolutely knew that the subtle gradations of grey/black on the Halftone image would not show up well on the texture but I stamped it anyway.  Sure enough, it did not stamp well, and the card started it’s trip to the big round file.  It was then that I thought if I could stamp the Half-tone image on smooth cardstock and put it on top of the watercoloured stripes, I could salvage the card.    The next problem was that I did not have the coordinating dies for this stamp set and the image was a fussy cutting nightmare with its’ little disconnected curves and edges.  That is when the miracle happened.  I decided to see if my Scan n Cut would be able to cut out the image.  It should not have been able to discern the edges that were not clearly connected to the main image, but low and behold, it did a fantastic job of cutting it out and the card was saved.