"Love You" by Melissa Struhs

 Who's loving all the inspirational ideas for the Colour Artist Inks? So many of the team are completely won over with their versatility and the ideas just keep coming...

I have made a quick card design today by choosing 5 of the colours to create an ombre grouping where the colour begins with lighter shades and progressing to the darker tones.

Following that order were my choices of Citrus, Barley, Cider, Spice and Sunburnt Colour Artist Inks.

Off the back of a previous project, I had some stamped butterfly images on Watercolour paper in 2 different sizes sitting on my desk.

Using a fine paintbrush, the Colour Artist inks were painted directly to the centre of the image. 

You can see that I did not bring the colour to the tips of the wings on any of the five variations.

I then sprayed all of the images with a few burst of water through a mister and let the natural flow of the liquid carry the colour across the images.

I dried them with my heat gun, this also gives you another way of moving the colour around to creating pooling effects as it dries.

You can repeat the process, add more water, more ink, drying it off as each repetition of this process leaves more layers and more textures for gorgeous water colour effects.

The above images were after 2 repetitions and each of the five blocks look so unique.

I fussy cut the images and layered the smaller image on top of the largest with foam pop dots close to the centre of the body, 

this raised the wings slightly and will give some great texture to the card front.

So, onto the quick card base, a Kraft cardstock mat was mounted and flicked with a white splatter of Gesso.

A long length of white sewing cotton was thrown onto the card and swirled to create a random look.

I added a stamped sentiment on to a Kraft artesian shape to the right of my vertical card.

And then began adhering the butterflies from the top to the bottom on the left side of the card. 

The liquid craft glue held the cotton strands in place but also leaves others loose.

The two tone effect of the layered butterflies really shows off how different you can create with the Colour Artist inks without too much experience. The combination of colours are quite Autumn like and look great paired with Kraft.

If you haven't got some of these products in your Mixed Media collection, you are missing out! So many great colours to choose from and a little of it goes a long way.

Till next time,

Mel.