Having a go at Watercolouring

Still trying to finish of my classes I signed up for at the beginning of the year for so I can start 2024 with a semi-clean slate. Not sure if I'm winning but slowly getting there.

One of the classes from Pinkfresh's February 2023 Create and Connect virtual class was Watercolor Flowers with Manushree Mishra, if you Google Manushree she's does amazing watercolour images so I was really looking forward to having a go.

Of course when the supply list came she was using liquid pH Martin (which is not available in NZ) with the suggestion to use Daniel Smith watercolor paints. The latter is available here but horrifically expensive. Either option would have cost me more than the price of my class so decided I was going to stick to what I owned which is a Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolour palette (18 colours) plus I have received over the years some Daniel Smith dot palettes but then I saw my local craft store had a reasonably priced half pan watercolor paint set from Altenew (Artist's Watercolor) so I thought that would give me a bigger range to play with. As you can see there are heaps of colours (24 to be exact) in the tin and they are really intense and creamy, with quite a good range of colours plus black and white.

But in the end I still used the dark pink (no. 34) from my Gansai Tambi set as it was closer to what Manushree was teaching but the other colours/paints came from the Altenew set. The first card she was teaching was wet on wet techniques and she almost did a different way  on each petal.

I wasn't that happy with my shadowing, I probably had too much water on my paint brush but I did enjoy painting alongside her. Today, I went back in with my ZIG Real Color brush markers in close shades and add a bit more shadowing and it actually looks quite good!!

I don't like the colour of watercolour paper if I'm honest which is why I use Ranger's as it is white but I think this is the paper that Pinkfresh Studio maybe releasing next year, it's quite cream but it was lovely to watercolour on, so I may have to change my mind. The image has just been stamped with a mid-grey dye ink; Metropolis and there's no bleeding at all. So to hide the cream and plainness of the cream watercolour panel I splattered with some red-gold paint (maybe too much) and the same dark pink watercolour from the Gansi Tambi sets. We were supposed to add a foiled sentiment but I didn't like that there background card was WHITE so I stamped Happy Birthday from the set with my Versafine Nocturne ink and clear embossed it on C9's Lemongrass card stock as I felt that was similar to the leaf colour. The Ombre glitter drops are Butterscotch, one thing about taking 9 months to do the class I have the whole range of  Ombre glitter drops now (Champagne was supplied in our kits originally).

This is a very simple card, the corners have been rounded using the largest Rounded and Braided die which was also in our kit and last but not least the stamp set is called Nothing But The Best and is part of Pinkfresh's recent release so it is available to purchase now.