Hi there and welcome!
It’s the 15th of the month and that means there’s a new challenge over on A Blog Named Hero! This month’s theme is “Anything Goes”. How easy is that?!
This time of year I get to see a lot of sunsets because they happen early enough for me to catch on the way home from work, or when I’m out and about on the weekends. I live in a beautiful area and am not too far from a marina from where I can look out onto the San Francisco Bay with San Francisco in the distance. I love taking pictures of the sunset and sharing them, as a way of sending warmth and light. Those colorful skies inspired this card and, since I wanted to evoke a bit of hope, I decided to create a sunrise, instead of a sunset.
The first thing I worked on was the sunrise. I started with a piece of Fabriano Artisto Extra White cold press watercolor paper and five Karin Brushmarker Pro markers: Skin 2 (a peachy color, boy they need a better name!), Gold, Cool Aqua, Cyan, and Indigo Blue. I’ve only just started playing with these markers and so far am liking them a lot. They are very juicy and the colors are vibrant!
I drew a few overlapping horizontal lines of Skin 2 onto the dry piece of paper and then, just above those I did the same with Gold. Using a round 8 brush, I added clean clear water over the Skin 2 and blended it into the Gold, and then I pulled the Gold up a little bit until it faded out.
At the the opposite end, I did the same with Indigo Blue, Cyan and Cool Aqua, first drawing a few lines, then adding water to blend them together and to pull the Cool Aqua down and fade it into the Gold. I tried not to overlap the Cool Aqua and Gold so that they wouldn’t create green.
I was really impressed with how well the colors blended together and how well they smoothed out, even when I drew directly onto dry paper. I sometimes struggle with water-based markers because I can’t get my scribble lines to smooth out but I didn’t have that problem with these colors on this paper.
While my sunrise was drying, I prepared the other pieces of the card. I used the Hero Arts Cloud Moon Fancy Die to die cut an A2-sized piece of Neenah Solar White and then I used the My Monthly Hero December 2019 card kit to stamp and die cut the two hands. I used the Color Layering Bouquet stamp set to stamp the sentiment onto Neenah Solar White and then trimmed it into a strip.
To assemble the card, I used foam tape to adhere the Cloud Moon panel over the watercolor panel. Then I adhered the hands flush to the card front, and used foam tape to adhere the sentiment.
One of the things that I love about this card is that when you peek downwards from the top of the card, you get a glimpse of more intense orange, as if you’re getting a sneak peek of the sun that’s coming over the horizon 🙂
Thank you so very much for visiting!
SkyPaperScissors 