Distress Oxide Ink Watercolouring

Hi everybody!! Its been such a great weekend with lots of card making done and a fun day with the kids today playing pool at a local bar. There is hardly anyone there during the day and they make the biggest bowls of fries. We laughed so hard at our attempts to get the balls in the holes. It was a lot of fun and will definitely have to do it again!!

Its not very often I do a blog post where I'm not showing you a card for a challenge or for a DT spot but I wanted to show you how much I'm loving a new to me watercolour idea from Jennifer McGuire!!

Recently Jennifer released this video about watercolouring with Distress Oxide Inks. I didn't know you could do that and loved the effect she got without much fuss. You will have heard me over the past year mentioning my frustration with my watercolouring skills. I thought this looked fun and what did I have to lose:

I am absolutely shocked as to how smooth the Oxide Inks are to paint with and you can make them as sheer or as opaque as you like. And the chalky finish is gorgeous. I don't use coloured CS very often on my cards but knowing now I can get such good results and coverage with these inks, I better stock up on more colours!!

All I did was heat emboss the Simon Says Stamp 'Beautiful Flowers' image on some navy CS with white powder. I don't own any green Oxide Ink apart from Cracked Pistachio, which I didn't think was good for a leaf colour, so I didn't paint them. And I'm glad I didn't because I really like their detail against the painted flowers.

Using Oxide Inks 'Peacock Feathers' and 'Mermaid Lagoon' and some water, I painted the flowers, using a watered down mixture for the first coat and then less water for the second. Once it had dried I heat embossed the sentiment (from the same stamp set) in white and cut the panel down to be smaller than the card front. I popped it on a piece of white foam and added some sequins from Neat and Tangled.

If you haven't seen the video yet, I couldn't encourage you more to take a look. And if you saw it but haven't tried these inks out, you must do it asap!! I have two other panels I painted with the same floral image and inks (in different colours) that I will turn into cards shortly and share with you. I was just so excited about being able to do this, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops!!

And if Jennifer McGuire lived nearby, I would be running over to her place, hugging her and telling her she has changed my 'watercolour' life!! I can't wait to see your cards with this type of watercolouring and I need to buy some more inks as I think I'll be doing this technique for a while.....

Take care
Shona