Topflight Stamps: Light Summer Rain Watercolor

Hi, friends! It's Monday which means that you Walter on the blog with you today. This week's theme is Anything Goes and I wanted to focus on my favorite brand in the Topflight Stamps shop - Chou & Flowers. I truly enjoy this brand/s designs and the scenes that you can easily build using their stamps. My vision for today's design is an overcast summer day with a light rain falling. We often think of the beauty of summer being held on a sunny day with lots of bright colors. However, there's much beauty in the rain and gray hues of an overcast day. For some, it may evoke feelings of melancholy while, for others, there is solace in the quietness of such a day. The good news is that it's all about how look at it and if you make the most of it, which is why the sentiment "Don't let life dull your sparkle" is perfect for it!

I used the following items from Topflight Stamps to create this design: Chou & Flowers In the Rain Stamp Set, Chou & Flowers Our Home Stamp Set, Lavinia Stamps Don't Let Life Dull Your Sparkle Stamp, Versafine Onyx Black Ink, and Hunky Dory Glitter Diamond Purple Sparkles Embellishments. From my stash, I used a 4" x 5.25" sized piece of watercolor paper, an A2 white card base, a 4 1/8th" x 5 3/8" piece of navy cardstock to serve as a mat, a watercolor pan set, masking paper, clear embossing ink, and white embossing powder.

The key to the scene is deciding on the placement of your focal objects, which for me were the woman with the umbrella and the phone booth, stamping them and then masking them. Creating a mask to protect your image allows you to easily use other stamps to build out the background and stamp over your focal points to include the details around them. As you may see in the next two pictures, I masked my subjects and then started to build out the beautiful brick plaza.

Creating the plaza only required the one stamp from the set. The stamp easily aligns with each stamped image and so it is just repeat moving & stamping to finish it.

With the plaza stamped, I arranged the row house stamp and part of one of the tree line stamps to complete the scene. Both the houses and the tree line stamps aligned perfectly on top of the plaza. I was finished with stamping and removed my masks to reveal the fully stamped scene.

I grabbed my heat tool and ran it over both sides of the panel to ensure that all of the ink was dry. I then began filling the scene with varying shades of watercolors. I used a mixture of grays and blues to paint the sky and the telephone booth, which I felt was a good mix to color the glass panes of the booth. Once the painting was complete, I again ran my heat tool over both sides of the panel to ensure dryness. I was then able to stamp my sentiment with clear embossing ink, add some white embossing powder, and heat set it. I then adhered the panel to the navy-blue mat and adhered the combined panel to the card base. A few Hunky Dory Diamond Sparkles were added for a little shimmer & shine.

I hope that you enjoy today's design! Do you often mask stamped objects to create scenes? Do you enjoy the process or view it as too much work? How about water coloring? Let me know in the comments. I'll see you again next Monday with another design. Until then . . . be well!

Topflight Stamp Supplies

Chou & Flowers In the Rain Stamp Set

Chou & Flowers Our Home Stamp Set