Watercolor background by Alice

Hello, everyone! It's Alice here. I am sharing one of my favorite techniques to make quick and one of a kind backgrounds. I first learned this technique from one of the "Thinking Inking" classes by Jennifer McGuire and have been using it ever since. Here is how I made mine.

You will need:

• A clean and slick work surface. I use a Non-Stick Craft Sheet from Ranger.
• Watercolor paper.
• Distress ink(s).
• Water spraying bottle.
• A piece of rag to clean the surface.
• A piece of seam binding. (optional)

First, press the ink pad directly on the work surface. Use as much ink as you want and you can use more than one colors, too. I am only using Aged Mahogany here.

Spritz water on the ink to create a pool of ink. You can control the intensity of the color by the among of the water you add.

Here is the fun part. Now you lay your watercolor paper on top of the pool of ink you just created. Move or drag the paper around a little to make sure that the whole surface gets ink. You can flip it over to make sure you got every corner of the paper inked.

When you are done, the paper would warp and the excess ink would flow to one edge. I usually just touch that edge with my rag lightly to soak up the excess ink. You can zap it with a heat tool to speed up the drying process, but I usually let it dry by itself. It takes about an hour to dry and I would just go and work on another project while it dries. =)

Here is the dried piece. It kind of turn flat again after it dries. I think I used a little too much ink on this one and made another one. Here is the card that I made with it.

I used part of it for the background and cut it using the Fancy Hearts border die. I colored and trimmed the adorable Henry Hugging Heart for my focal image then added a piece of matching seam binding. The sentiment is from the General Sayings II set and the Caramel Sugar Half Pearl is also from Whiff of Joy.

Here is how I made the matching seam binding. =)

I always soak up the leftover ink with a piece of seam binding whenever I made backgrounds like this.

To give the seam binding a scrunched look, just squeeze the seam binding into a ball on the piece of rag with your fingers. This will squeeze out the excess water and give the seam binding an uneven distribution of ink.

After squeezing it pretty hard, I usually open it up and just let it dry on the rag. Again, you can speed up the drying process by zapping it with a heat gun. Just make sure you move the heat gun often so that you don't burn the seam binding.

That seem like a lot of things, but hope you will give this a try! =)

Thanks for stopping by!

hugs,

alice