Technique of The Week: Watercolor Drop In

I thought that I would share a watercolor technique this week for my Technique of the Week.  I have a video below to show you how easy this technique is!

This is a simple watercolor drop in technique that makes very quick cards.  I picked one of my favorite stamp sets for this technique.  It is a Catherine Pooler Designs stamp set called Beautiful You.  It’s a loose and airy floral set that works well to fill with water and just drop some diluted ink in with a paint brush or an aqua brush.  The water does all the work of mixing the colors and you get a different result every time you do it.

To create this card, I used this week’s Paper Craft Crew Sketch.  This is our 300th card challenge!!!

Here is the sketch that I used…as you can see it is a nice Clean and Simple (CAS) sketch.

Check out my video tutorial for this technique below:

For this card, I used a 4-1/4 x 5-1/2″ piece of Canson XL watercolor paper.  I also used the Altenew Crisp Dye Inks: Hunter Green, Sweet Leaf, Galactic Stream and Dew Drops.  I used a #8 round brush, some water, and a Distress Spray bottle of water to wet my inks.  The stamped images were inked in Versa Mark and heat embossed in white for the florals and black for the sentiment.

To finish off the card, I used Studio Katia iridescent bubbles and Doodlebug Design Beetle Black Swiss Dot washi tape.  The card base is white card stock cut at 4-1/4 x 11″ and scored at 5-1/2″.  I did cut down the watercolor paper to 3-3/4″ so that the washi tape would show along the side of the card base.  The top mat is attached with 3M foam tape.

This technique is a watercolor resist technique or a watercolor drop in technique.  It actually uses both techniques to get the effect that you see.

I love this technique because it is quick to do and it is never perfect.  I never feel pressure for this to be just so.  I wet the paper inside the embossing, drop in my colors and then let the water do the mixing.

The hardest part is waiting for it to dry!!  I find that I get prettier results if I let it air dry rather than rushing it with the heat tool.  It requires more patience than I have some days!

I love this stamp set for this technique because you can see how loose and open the images are.  I think that these kinds of images work the best for me with this technique.  Everyone has their own preference, but all in all, I really love the images in this set for the drop in technique.

Thank you for stopping by!  I hope you stop over at the Paper Craft Crew and play along with the challenge with us!  You don’t need a blog, your pictures can be linked from your social media accounts.  We would love to have you give this sketch a try.  It is always fun to see what people come up with!!

Happy crafting.  Remember to embrace the imperfections!