Liquid Watercolours and Mandalas

I've been having a play with the new liquid water colours from Avery Elle this weekend.  I must admit when I saw them being peeked at Creativation I wasn't sure what the fuss was about but so many people were raving about liquid water colours in general that I knew I had better get them in store for you or risk missing out on the next big trend (lots of brands have them - we'll have the Hero Arts version in a few weeks too)

Now I am no water colourist so was not about to create a landscape masterpiece, so I just decided to play and see what I could do with them.

Firstly I just tried a background technique - I wet a piece of thick watercolour paper all over with a water sprayer and then just dropped random drops of colour in shades of green and blue all over and allowed them to expand and run.  Once dry I added some neat drops for a stronger pigment look and then added a few spatters with a paintbrush.  I allowed it to dry again and then went about die cutting it to create a big birthday wish card using the big balloon border from MFT's Blue Prints 26, their new Wish word die and the simple alphabet from AlteNew.

Next I wanted to try painted with them over embossing.  I embossed the new MFT Mandala stamp from MFT using satin pearl embossing powder on watercolour paper and then got it good and wet.  I then just drew circles of colour -the bottles are great for this technique - and spread the colour with a paintbrush.

I trimmed it down to fit a 4x6 card once dry and stamped over a sentiment from the new Anything But Basic Birthday Sentiments from MFT using versafine black ink so it would hold on the embossing.  [My top tip is to have a Kuretake Sketching pen to hand for this - its a permanent marker so will fill in any gaps!]

Whilst I was playing with Mandalas, I wanted to play with the co-ordinating die - this does not cut the stamp - it's smaller but the same shape so you could do some fun layering.  I thought that it had a floral shape so die cut it twice from some old ombre purple paper and layered them over each other to create my floral shape.  I added some silver glitter highlights around and finished with another sentiment from the previous MFT set.

 NEWS FROM THE STORE

This week we will have the following:

• The new release from Mama Elephant - it has shipped so fingers crossed will be here for release day on the 15th.
• The current release from Concord and 9th is hopefully shipping to us tomorrow so we should have it by the end of the week customs willing.
• The new release from Newton's Nook  is shipping this week.
• The new release from Sugar Pea Designs is shipping to us this week hopefully.
• We are waiting for the new Altenew release to ship. 

• We are still waiting for the Hero Arts new release to reach the UK distributor - all we know is that it is "expected late February"
• The Lawn Fawn release date has been confirmed as 22nd February.  We will have it in store on that date.

We have our Stamping Bella delivery but due to the massive numbers of new releases we've still not managed to open it all and add it to the store yet (there's a tonne of it!) so bear with us - we'll fit it in around the new releases when we can.