One of the reasons I love watercolours so much is that with most of the colours, you can lift off some paint to create lighter areas. This works particularly well with stencils as the following samples show. The beauty of this technique is you don't need to do anything special with laying down your watercolour background, it's just that, a background so slap that colour down. It can be a single colour, some granulating colours or multiple colours. They are all tied together when you use the stencil to remove some of the paint and then add your die-cuts or imagery on top. Gel pens and sparkly paint can also help to elevate these to the next level. I've tried to keep these fairly simple to not detract from the beautiful watercolour paints, particularly some of the granulating or mica shift paints.
"Let's play a game"
(I've wanted to use this hangman charm
for quite a while and I thought it suited
this atc perfectly.)
(I kept the watercolour paint more contained
on this background. The paint is a Mica
Supervision granulating paint and splits
into blue and gold. I made the feathers
and the bird from washi tape.)
"Champagne"
"We live but for a moment"
(Only 2 colours of granulating paint were
used for this one with a little metallic gel
pen for the details in the water and weeds.)
"Seas the day"
(The jellyfish are cut from vellum. It's very
difficult to see the shimmer paints used on
this one, trust me, it's very sparkly!)
"Let life surprise you"
(You don't have to cover the whole of the
background with the stencil, just partially
taking away some of the paint works well too.)
