Victoria Marie Fall Crop "Make it Colourful" Challenge

It's been a busy time of year craftwise - lots of challenges finishing up this week, so I only got to try a single challenge (other than the one I hosted).

The one that most sparked my interest was hosted by Beth Soler and was colour based and messy! (Yay!)

This is her challenge:

"Your challenge is to create a colorful background with whatever medium you have that can work as watercolors. The twist is that you must use your favorite color and tell your thoughts and feelings about the photo!" 

Naturally the first order of business was to over complicate things unnecessarily - check! 🙄 I have plenty of watercolours in various forms and qualities, but Beth's words "work like a watercolour" made me want to try something that isn't really a watercolour to see what I could do.

Distress products are cheating since everyone knows how beautifully they work as watercolours, but the idea of using spray mist came from that.

The paper I chose to spray over was in keeping with the story.  I was continuing with my "Dyan" layouts and this is number two.  Any sketchy black on white design really reminds me of her stamps and this was a stamping class.

I started by gathering all my pink mists.  I had about 12 (!) 😮 in various brands and formulations from very shimmery to a bit shimmery to no shimmer.  From a deep hot pink to the palest blush, from opaque almost painty mist to very translucent.

My first mistake was not applying clear gesso first.  I thought it would make the paper too slick.  The mist absorbed quickly and didn't really run down the page the way I imagined.  It looked almost passable for able three minutes, but as it spread and dried, all the colours started mixing together and I basically just had a pink paper (sob). 😢

I set it aside preparing to start again after cooking dinner since the FamBam wanted to eat (again??!)  😝.  It was a warm evening and it had dried and the paper felt a lot less porous, so before starting again, I gave it one more chance.  This time I was prepared to dry between colours with the heat gun but it came in more handy blowing the paint down.

Adding a bit of opaque white gave just the extra bit of interest I wanted, so in the end it wasn't half bad at all.

Plenty of paper layers and embellies as is my norm came next.  I'm trying to continue using many of the same supplies throughout the layouts.  There are a few things I have failed to include for the second layout running now and it's starting to bug me!

Anyway,  how perfect are those Heidi Swapp phrase stickers?? 😍😍😍  I did come armed with several bottles of Diet Coke as always.

 So back to Beth's challenge - Pink was an easy choice.  Not only because it's my favourite, but because it featured heavily in the story.  While we ended up swapping the warm paints with cool paints halfway through the classe, I pounced on the pink ones each time.  Dyan likes pink too!

As for the photo - I took it early in the class.  I was struggling with a flare in my jaw that triggers a hard to control migraine, so despite pain meds and copious ammounts of Diet Coke, I struggled through the stamping class and managed to screw up a simple masking exercise when I do much more fancy masking at home. 🙄


In addition to the pink paint, I also managed to snag the cat stencil to use so that photo is definitely a "happy place" photo despite being in pain.  I really needed to get away and crafty - preferably away from home distractions and using messy things.  I got all that and more and have come away much more inspired and motivated since then.

The smaller photo shows how messy my hands still were after I got home.  They really don't show how bad it actually way!  The sure sign of a day well spent.

Basically after the layout is all done, this is about the only bit of the background left, but you still get the idea I think!

Love and happy misting!