Birthday Rose

 

I had printed the "Rose Blossom" digital image from Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps onto a piece of cotton fabric several months ago. I had intended it for a project that I ended up not doing, so it's been sitting on a shelf over my desk ever since. I wanted to paint it with watercolors, so I had coated it with Daniel Smith Transparent Watercolor Ground. I've never done this before (painting watercolors on fabric), even with the watercolor ground, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I finally decided to go ahead & paint it, then make it into a card.

To prepare my fabric, after I'd printed the image onto it, I adhered it with double-sided sheet adhesive to a piece of white cardstock. Then I added the watercolor ground. As I said, this was all quite some time ago. I began painting wet-on-dry, adding the watercolor to the dry fabric. It didn't move quite as much as I wanted, so I switched to a wet-in-wet technique. I painted one petal at a time, adding clear water to the petal, then flooding in color. That worked OK, though the paint then tended to move more than I wanted. So I ended up doing a wet-on-kind-of-dry technique. I did make sure not to paint 2 adjacent petals before allowing the first to dry, so the rose wouldn't become all one solid color.

When I painted one of the leaves, the paint ended up getting away from me a bit, & stained the fabric outside the leaf. I tried wetting that area with just plain water & blotting with a paper towel, but it wouldn't come up. So I decided to embrace that, & just added green to the whole background, again painting wet-in-wet. I like the variegated color I ended up getting.

I heat embossed the "happy birthday" from Altenew's "Painted Greetings" set with Ranger Silver powder onto a strip of Essentials by Ellen 40 lb. vellum. I cut the strip longer than the width of my panel, folded the ends around the sides of the panel, & adhered them to the back. That way, I didn't have to worry about adhesive showing through the vellum. I matted my panel with black cardstock & adhered it to a white A2-size card base.

I'm entering this card in the following challenges:

Creative Knockouts #392: "Birthday Wishes"

613 Avenue Create March Challenge: "Anything Goes" (not playing the twist)