Watercolor for Cardmakers -- Day 1 Efforts

Yay! Class has started at last, and although I will be awfully busy for the next two weeks, I did get a couple hours to experiment with today's lessons.

In the first one, we laid a stencil over the wet paint. My first effort used a swirly stencil and it can barely be seen.

I redid it using a chevron stencil and it turned out better:

For the second exercise, we used distress ink on an acrylic block. I love how vibrant the color came out. The first one kind of smeared unattractively off the edges, so I taped off a rectangle and I like the second one better.

The third exercise was problematic. I had no success using embossing powder -- either clear or white -- on watercolor paper. Possibly that's not true of all watercolor paper, just mine which was low end. The embossing just sunk into the paper and you can barely see the pattern. The color wash was also -- well -- pretty washed out:

I did a third example using white embossing on cardstock instead of watercolor paper, and didn't dilute my paints as much. I like this so much better.

Now, all of these are intended to be made into cards, but that's all the time I had today and I wanted to try the techniques. I will definitely make my 3 most successful efforts into cards, but it may have to wait until catch-up week. For now, I'm just thrilled that I got to play a little today!