Watercolored Backgrounds with CAS-ual Fridays!

Welcome to some CAS-ual Fridays watercolor inspiration!  I'm really loving my Paul Rubens glittery watercolors lately and creating lots of backgrounds with them.  I'm sharing with you today one of the ways I've been using them (or maybe two).

Nothing like a beautiful floral and this Pretty Posies set is SO lovely.  And with it's pretty and simple sentiments, the set is perfect for any occasion!

I cut my panel of watercolor paper and started by stamping the medium flower from the set in versamark and heat embossing with some Wow Bright White Embossing Powder.  When I'm random stamping I like to start with my largest image and stamp in a triangle pattern leaving room for my other images.  Then I go down to the next smallest image and do the same and fill in with the smallest.

Because the paper is white and it can be hard to see the images on the paper I heat emboss each set of images separately.  It also helps to keep me from smudging and ruining an image because my thumbs tend to get in the way.

Then I start to add my background color.  I don't worry so much about getting the background color over the images because a lot of the time it just mixes in with the other colors I add and creates some really cool colors.  Also because it's water, you also have the option to wet a space again and lift up the color with a paper towel.  I did that for my smallest flowers a bit because I was using orange and felt it would be a better color without mixing with the blue.  I'd let the background color dry and then see if I wanted to add any more color until I was happy.  Really the waiting is the hardest part as the song says...lol!

After I was happy with my background coverage, I started adding color back in with a smaller paintbrush.  Again, I would let my colors dry and then add some more where I wanted it.  I mixed in some purple with my pink and a couple different greens on the leaves... along with the blue I love the way they came out!

When I had everything colored in, I let it dry and splattered some more colors on with my tiny paint brush.  It's so much fun to play with watercolors this way!  

I stamped and embossed a few more of each of the images onto some watercolor paper to be cut out and popped up on my card.  I added this simple sentiment from the set and finished my sentiment ...

With this Hello from the Sweet Friend Fri-Dies... 

And there you have it!  I did fussy cut my images out because in my usual fashion I FORGOT I had the dies!!  Oh I wish I hadn't forgotten that...lol!  Although I don't mind cutting.. it sure would have been SO much easier had I just die cut them out.  Don't ask me how I forget these things... I just do...lol!

I'm playing along over at Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday Challenge which is to Create Your Own Background and with Die Cutting Divas Embossing Challenge!  You should too!

I had some extra flowers left over so I decided to create one more quick one:

Rather than creating a new identical background... I just used my watercolors with the Modern Petals Stencil for an even quicker and simpler background.. I'm gonna make a few more of these as well and I'll share those with you next time!

To make things easier for myself I kept the same design basically and this one came together quickly!

Have I mentioned how much I love the font on these Sweet Friend Fri-Dies??

So that's me for today!  I hope you enjoyed your stop here today and you'll pull out your watercolors and play a little.  I know I'm going to be doing just that very soon!

If you've seen something here today that you must have, I have this for you:

And come back soon for more inspiration!  You can find us at these places: