Sakura Watercolors – Watercoloring 3D Embossed Background

Hello crafty friends! This is Jennifer Rustioni from @armieritagli! I’m so happy to be here again as a guest on the Spellbinders Blog! Today I share with you a step-by-step tutorial of the card I realized featuring the amazing Sakura Koi Watercolors! This set of 24 watercolors is truly beautiful and perfect for urban sketching or for indoor watercoloring as well.

I chose to use these beautiful watercolors to create a Christmas card. I realized a coloring different from my usual, using an embossing folder instead of a stamp.

When using brand new colors (every type of color) for the first time, I recommend you create a color chart. This is really important because the real colors are often very different from the colors on the packaging or, as in this case, from the colors of the dry half pan. This way you’ll always know which color corresponds to a specific name or code. As you can see, these watercolors have really beautiful and vibrant shades!

After making the color chart, I started to realize my project. I embossed a sheet of watercolor paper using the amazing Spellbinders Holly & Foliage 3D, from the De-Light-Ful Christmas Collection by Yana Smakula. I recommend you to choose a good watercolor paper and to wet it before embossing it. In this way the result will be optimal and every detail will be perfect.

At this point, I started to color my embossed paper. I used the different shades of green to personalize the colors for the leaves. I always prefer to create a personal color instead of using a pure watercolor from the set, because in this way you can realize a really rich color.

I began coloring the bigger leaves in two different shades of green.

I continued coloring the smallest leaves creating other two different shades of green, to give more variety to my work.

Then, I colored the berries mixing two shades of red from my Sakura Koi Watercolor Set.

I added some colored splashes using the same shades I used for the leaves and the berries. I also created white splashes using the Chinese White from the set. You have to know that the white color has a slightly different composition and it’s more covering than the other watercolors.

At last, I white-hot foiled a sentiment from the Spellbinders A Merry Little Christmas Sentiments Glimmer Hot Foil Plate & Die Set. I die-cut it with the coordinate dies and then glued it in the middle of my card.

Spellbinders Supplies:

Other supplies

Canson XL Aquarelle

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll like my project and it will inspire you! Wish you all a colorful day!