WWC62 - Leanne's Tic-Tac-Toe Challenge

Welcome to Watercooler Wednesday!

This week's Challenge gives you lots of choice - which can be a challenge in itself. Leanne has put together a Tic-Tac-Toe Challenge, which works just like the game. Choose any three in a row, horizontal, vertical or diagonal.
Here are your choices:

When I first looked at this, I had tentatively decided on the top line: Flower-Watercolour-Fun Fold. Then, when I was "researching" Pinterest for inspiration, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks! Does that ever happen to you?

What I saw was an absolutely breath-taking card done by Sandi MacIver.  She also created a detailed video about what she calls Sepia Watercolour Technique. So, I could still use the flower and watercolour, but her technique also had embossing. So, I switched my choice to the Flower-Embossing (dry or heat)-Paper Piercing. The Paper Piercing was easy to add in the corners.

As I was gathering my supplies, the first snag I ran into was that I don't have the stamp set she used. I ended up using a Hostess Set from the 2014-2015 catalogue - Bloom with Hope.

The next snag happened when I grabbed Early Espresso instead of Soft Suede to do the wash on the watercolour paper. However, I didn't clue in until much later that that was what I had done. By that time, I had done so much I didn't want to scrap it and start over. And, I had already messed up one side of my watercolour paper and was working on the second side! How can something that should be so easy end up being so difficult? Well, grab the wrong colour of ink, for starters.

To try and lighten things up, I took the largest acrylic block, spritzed it with Stampin' Mist, and pressed it onto the watercolour paper. While it was still moist, I used my Aquapainter and removed colour from where it was the darkest. I finally got it to where it didn't look too bad.

At this point, here's what I had done:
1. Using aqua painter, wet the watercolour paper all over.
2. Pick up ink from the lid of stamp pad and just brush randomly all over. You want varying shades of colour - dark, medium and light.
3. If not in a hurry, let air dry. Or, use your heat tool to speed things up.

Next, stamp flower image using Staz-On Black. Again using the aqua painter, pick up more of the Early Espresso (or Soft Suede) ink and add a bit to the flower petals.

In Sandi's video, her next step involved using a tiny paint brush to 'paint' bleach along the tips of the flower petals. That's when I encountered Snag #3. I didn't have a really tiny paint brush. And, I didn't want to run out to the Dollar Store to find one. So I thought, use what I have. But, even the smallest one I had wasn't fine enough and I didn't like how it looked. But, I waited before trying anything else and went on the the next step.

That step was done with 2 images from what's fast becoming my favourite stamp set - Timeless Textures. First, I stamped the flourish with Versamark Ink and embossed with white embossing powder. Then take the dots image and stamp randomly with Staz-On Black. The sentiment is from Picture Perfect and is also embossed with white embossing powder.

Here's a close-up of part of my card:

You can see the paper piercing details in the corners.

Because I didn't like how the bleached areas looked, I used my Signo White Gel Pen and covered most of them up! Brightened things up nicely. Finally, I used a stamp from Really Good Greetings and just inked the word 'imagine' with Staz-On Black, stamped off once. Just stamp this randomly. You could use any word you wanted - or two or three different words in different fonts.

And here is the final product:

 
 Now it's your turn - head over to the Watercooler Wednesday blog to see what choices all the other Watercooler Artists went with. This challenge is a lot of fun because there are so many options!