I’m back again with another card today – I’ve got a backlog of ClarityCrafts design team cards to share, so trying to get caught up a bit! This one uses ‘Linda’s country scenes – elements’ stamps that I was demonstrating on Create & Craft TV last weekend, set on a watercolour background, and I’m going to share it with AAA Cards as it picks up their optional birthday theme.

The first step was to create my watercolour background. I took a page from Clarity’s large watercolour paper pad, using low tack tape to divide it into four sections (I ran the tape across the horizontal & vertical centres, then went round the edge with it at half width – that allows for an even border when you cut the card across the middle into sections). I used a wide flat paintbrush, put a glaze of water across the card and then added ‘broken china’, ‘mowed lawn’ and ‘carved pumpkin’ Distress Oxides, putting the inks on a blending mat so they were easy to pick up with my brush. I then left the paper to fully dry – an hour or two should do it, but overnight is ideal.

Having removed the tape and chopped the card into quarters, I ran more masking tape across the bottom edge and down the right-hand side, so my stamped images wouldn’t stray into the margin. I stamped the large kingfisher from the ‘Old Water Mill’ set, then added the bullrushes from the ‘Friendship Narrowboat’, using black Archival ink. Out came my favourite Pergaliner pencils and I simply shaded in the images. I hadn’t bothered with masking for this, but instead used the colours to pull the bullrushes to the front where they sat over the kingfisher.

I then added one of the ‘occasions sentiments’ stamps, together with the little bird from the ‘Romany Caravan’ set. I used a rectangular embedder to create a frame on the front of a 7×7 kraft card blank and attached the watercoloured piece into it, finishing with one of the additional phrases from the sentiments set.

These backgrounds are so easy to do – and huge thanks to Barbara for the inspiration at last year’s Clarity retreat! I’ve got quite a stash of them now in various colours, just waiting to be used on future projects!