Postcards

The weather is not being to good to us at the moment here and I really am missing the summer sunshine.  Looking at my work I came across a vibrant post card that I had made last summer and thought this would be a good thing to focus on today, maybe chase away the rain?

I have a large stock of water colour card, big A3 sheets of the stuff and one of my favourite past-times is laying colour down in random places, spraying with water, moving inks around, spraying with more ink and generally getting messy. The end results are totally unique and often very surprising.  For this piece I used diluted Ranger inks but any water based ink works well.  There are lots of sprays, shimmers and inks out there.  I often make up my own using either empty spray bottles from previous shop bought product or sometimes you can find refillable spray bottles in the holiday section of your pharmacy.  Add mica powder for shimmer if you want too.  You can get some interesting colours cheaply by using the centres from felt pens.  The core of the pen needs to be dropped into a small amount of water which colours the water.  Be aware that this ink may not be archival quality and so don't use on anything precious.

I took one of these large inked A3 pieces of card and cut it down to roughly postcard size.  Final cutting to be done at the end so that straight lines in the design ended up perfectly aligned. This gave me a bunch of cards with the same colour scheme.  

I used a big rubber stamp of a butterfly and a saying to decorate this card.  I used a permanent ink, I generally use Stazon, in black so that I could add more colour to certain areas knowing that the images would not run.  The nature of the water colour card meant that the image is not as crisp as it would be if stamped onto a flat surface.  I like this 'broken line' look.

I placed the saying first keeping it off centre and low also trying to find a lighter area so the saying is easy to read. I then stamped the butterfly making sure I had one as complete as possible given the size, and stamping others off the card.  Using less diluted inks in the same colours I then added more colour to the butterflies and the border of the saying not worrying too much about keeping the ink in the lines. Once cut to size I finished off the card by inking around the edges.  

Enjoy your day.

Kim x