Watercolour "Smooshing" Technique Tutorial

The Design Bundle which is available from Designbundle.net has some amazing products included in it.

One part of the bundle includes Japanese Ink Painting files. The files are Jpeg, Png and Vector format so no matter what program you are using you can access these beautiful designed images.

But what to do with them???

You can simply print them and use them as an image to pop on the wall, you could use them as part of a digital design or in my card I thought they would be a perfect image for greeting cards.

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to combine these images with a simple watercolour technique.

Watercolour "smooching" is an easy technique which will give you a mixed watercolour effect without the different coloured watercolours bleeding into each other and becoming a grey/brown mess.

You will need the following for this tutorial-
Sumi-e Japanese ink painting elements from the Design Bundle
Watercolour Paper (that you can run through a printer)
Laser Printer (inkjet is ok but you risk the ink bleeding)
Tim Holtz Distress inks
Cardstock
Sentiment Die ( I used a Simon Says Stamp die)
Piece of Acetate
Paper Towel
Water Spritz bottle

1- Print your design onto Watercolour paper. You can use regular paper but I find that you get a better effect with the Watercolour paper.

If possible use a laser printer. I have found you get a better result as the watercolour ink will not affect the print.

2- Trim the image and then tape it to a flat surface with scotch tape. I have am A4 piece of board I use to keep my work flat.

3- Take your first colour ink pad.

I am using Tim Holtz Distress ink as it has some quite unique abilities and works really well with water. You can use any water based paint the same way as I am using the ink today. 

Put some of the ink pad onto a waterproof surface I am using a teflon sheet. Once you have the ink on, spritz it with water to make the ink thinner. Grab your piece of acetate and bend it. then place that bend into the ink.

4- With the ink on your acetate place it onto your image. Move it around a little bit to spread the ink about. Remove the acetate.

5- You can see below that the ink is spread onto the image.

6-Repeat the above steps with different coloured inks on the printed image.

7- If at any point you have too much ink on the page use some paper towel to dab it off.

 8- Once you have covered the page in the paint/ink let dry. you can use a heat tool to also dry your work.

9- At this point you can go over the image a second time to add colour or make some colours deeper if needed.

10- Trim your image.

11-Adhere to a piece of black cardstock.

12- With a bone folder make a line above the image.

13- Trim off the excess cardsock leaving a 1cm lip after the fold.

14- Adhere the excess black cardstock to the lip of the card. this will make your folded card.

15- Add a sentiment on to your card. I used a die cut sentiment out of black cardstock.

Your card is now completed!

This technique is a great way to add colour to a black and white image. you could print your own watercolour backgrounds from many of the files from the Design Bundle but if you do not have Ai to use the vectors in or would like a more realistic look, this is the way to go :)

Until next time.....