Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card was made by watercolouring the stamped image. I’ve watercoloured using inks before, but this was the first time using watercolour pencils, and I was following the online tutorials from the brilliant Barbara Gray at Claritystamp. You can find them here – lots of great tips and techniques on doodling picture and on colouring from her daily Facebook live sessions https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDaKSomkGEpxOiFCH4CqFQ

I started by stamping the large parakeet stamp onto white card. You can probably see in the picture that I didn’t get the bottom corner of the image stamped sharply, but I managed to rescue it by using a black micron pen to fill in the outline

I then set about watercolouring the images (supported by Barbara’s advice!). I found pictures of parakeets on Google images, to find a colour combination I liked – there are so many. This blue, yellow & grey one reminded me of my grandma’s budgie when I was little!

I then coloured in the branches and the sky, before mounting the topper onto a blue mat to lift out the colours of the birds. I know my watercolouring needs to get a bit better – no doubt practice will make perfect

Because of the shape of the stamp, it fits well onto a DL size card, and so I’ve also entered it into this week’s Freshly Made Sketches challenge at https://freshlymadesketches.blogspot.com/

Life is starting to get busier at the moment, but I hope you’re still getting time to listen to the birds in your garden. There are parakeets in London, and I’ve seen some locally, but I’m hoping they don’t make it into my garden. They’re seen as a pest, driving out the local native birds