Hi! Today I have a fun and festive, yet very simple card to share, featuring the Confetti Celebration stamp set from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Julian Charlton. I love Elliot and Marcel, they’re so fun and quirky. They’re also not super detailed in the linework, which gives me the opportunity to practice my watercoloring.

I bought a 36 tube set of Mijello Mission Gold watercolors last September, and they’ve been sitting in their palette scaring me, but I’ve recently started dabbling a little bit. Images like this with big open areas are great for practice, and this is my third proper watercolor piece. Yes, I’m keeping track, haha. The previous two attempts were both noline. One was a background, and the other a digital stamp. My printer ink doesn’t play well (or at all, really) with water, so I had to opt for the noline look to prevent visible bleeding. I dove right into the deep end, hoping I could pull it off.

I stamped the image onto Fabriano Artistico Extra White watercolor paper using VersaFine Onyx Black ink. I’ve created a birthday card with these two once before (blog post here). Back then, I used blue, green and yellow, so I wanted a different palette for today’s card. Pink, orange and yellow is a palette I really love, and with the pink watercolor wash on the background, as well as the Poppin’ Pink cardstock from My Favorite Things that I chose to create my card base from, I think this is a really fun card.

For my last card with this image, I used my Copic BV20 series for a purply gray elephant. This time, I went for a bluer version to get a nice contrast. I actually decided to mute my pink a little before painting with it. The Bright Opera color from Mijello is a super bright pink, and I added a tiny bit of Hooker’s Green to dull it a little, it was just too bright a pink straight from the palette for what I wanted.

Once I’d painted my scene, I went back over with a black pen to trace the lines of the image. I would have restamped if I could, but I stamped the image weeks before I painted it and removed the stamp from my MISTI in the meantime. Black pen to the rescue. I just wanted crisp black lines. I stamped a sentiment from the stamp set using VersaFine Onyx Black ink and heat embossed that using clear embossing powder.

I cut down my colored panel slightly and adhered it to an A7 top fold card base I created from two pieces of Poppin’ Pink cardstock from Papertrey Ink. To finish the card I adhered sequins, beads, confetti and other various little bits from the Sweet Shop mix from Little Things from Lucy’s Cards. I don’t usually put this many sequins on my cards and scatter them like this, but I wanted to really keep the party vibe from these two going across the entire card front.