Rainbow Backgrounds

I have not been very well since Christmas, and have not even felt up to crafting much.  Most of the posts of late have been of things I made ages ago...my stash has been sitting on the kitchen table just making me feel guilty.

To help me to feel better, I was encouraged to take up making things again.  On the positive side, I had seen lots of demonstrations of techniques on the TV, and these cards made use of a very expensive set of pens  the kids bought me for my birthday last year, but had seen little use.  I saw Sheena Douglass show how to use them on water colour paper; she added a small stripe of ink from the red pen at the top, and then used water to move it across the top inch or two, then under it I added the next rainbow colour in the same way, and blended it into the first colour.  This carried on until reaching the bottom of the page.  Once the sheet dried, the glitter on the pens looks amazing; you can't really see it on the photos.

 Sheena showed how to make the moon by using water on a brush to move a circle of the paint away, making the clouds in the same way.  I loved the effect, so I made a few backgrounds and used them for card fronts, stamping onto and die cutting.

As the backgrounds are so sparkly, I kept the rest of the card pretty plain.  The flower silhouettes are cut from Tim Holtz wildflowers, and the sentiment is a docrafts one, heat embossed in white.  I used an anti-static bag before stamping, as the watercolour card can hold onto the powder in the wrong places, and my MISTI to overstamp on the rough surface a few times.

The sympathy stamp is (possibly) from an Altenew set... I thought it stood out well over the blue foreground.  My colleagues from work have sent me some lovely cards and flowers, so I hope to send these off in the next few days to show my gratitude before I get back to work in the near future.