Hello crafty friends. I’m back with another of the cards I demo’d on Friday’s YouTube show (you can watch it back here), this time using the Retro Bubbles stamps (well, one of them!). As with the triangles card that I blogged on Friday, you can easily make a great card with just one stamp and a bit of colour. For this one, I used a piece of watercolour card and some Distress Oxides with a waterbrush – read on for the details.

The first step was to cut a piece of the watercolour card to 4 3/4 inches square (13cm) and then stamp the bubbles image with black Archival ink. It came out with a bit of a grungy feel against the texture of the paper, but I quite like it.

I then set about adding a colour wash to the bubbles with a waterbrush, putting my inks on a mix mat. I actually used two waterbrushes for this – the first to add a clear glaze of water to the area I was colouring and the second to then add the ink over it. This gives you a much more even spread of the ink, rather than applying it to the dry paper. This is the design I started in Friday’s show but didn’t finish, so I grabbed a bit of time this afternoon to complete it, using ‘dried marigold’, ‘carved pumpkin’, ‘wilted violet’ and ‘pine needles’. And the other great thing was that my inks reactivated with water after I left them to dry on the mat on Friday, so they weren’t wasted!

All I then did was attach it to a black 6×6 card blank (once the inks had fully dried) and add a word sticker. And here’s my original one that I did, using different colours (and the stamp the other way up!)

I had such fun colouring in these circles – I don’t do a huge amount of watercolour, but it worked so well for this design.

And the reason I changed my colour scheme for the show? I picked up the palette from the current Cardz 4 Guyz challenge, which works really well. My circles also reflect the ‘geometric’ theme at The Male Room, so this little card will be appearing in both galleries!